Taut Quotes & Sayings

Taut, merry, nervous, expertly mounted, exquisitely clothed, haughty in their bright youth, the chevaliers of France poured from the disheveled clearing. Sunlit, all that morning, they spanned the glittering woods: diamond on diamond, grey on grey, riches on riches; bough and limb indistinguishable; skirts and meadows sewn in the same silks; skulls in antique fantasy knotted with rhizome and leafy with fern frond. Webs, manes, beards, spun the same smokelike filament; rime flashed; jewels sparked, red and fat, on rosebush and ring. Earth and animals wore the same livery. Jazerained in its berries, the oak tree matched their pearls, and paired their brilliant-sewn housings with low mosses underfoot, freshets winking half-ice in the pile. — Dorothy Dunnett

If one of these, if a hundred of them, a thousand, came too soon or failed to thrive or were born incomplete somehow, born blue or ill made or with reason's taut string already snapped, it was of little matter in the long history of God's bustling. There — Alice McDermott

The air, which had been stretched taut with excitement, relaxed again. — Chinua Achebe

I opened the other envelope. It contained a photograph of a girl. The pose suggested a natural ease, or a lot of experience in being photographed. It showed darkish hair which might possibly have been red, a wide clear forehead, serious eyes, high cheekbones, nervous nostrils and a mouth which was not giving anything away. It was a fine-drawn, almost a taut face, and not a happy one — Raymond Chandler

You fight with dreams as with formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when you begin to read a book and you don't yet know in which direction it will carry you. What you would like is the opening of an abstract and absolute space and time in which you could move, following an exact, taut trajectory; but when you seem to be succeeding, you realize you are motionless, blocked, forced to repeat everything from the beginning. — Italo Calvino

What the hell is that?" yelled Lord Maccon. He had turned to anger so swiftly; Alexia could only stare at him, speechless.
She let out her pent-up breath in a whoosh. Her heart was beating a marathon somewhere in the region of her throat, her skin felt hot and stretched taut over her bones, and she was damp in places she was tolerably certain unmarried gentlewomen were not supposed to be damp in.
Lord Maccon was glaring at her coffee-colored skin, discolored between the neck and shoulder region by an ugly purple mark, the size and shape of a man's teeth.
"that is a bite mark, my lord," she said.
Lord Maccon was ever more enraged. "Who bit you?" he roared.
Alexia tilted her head to one side in amazement. "You did." She was then treated to the spectacle of an Alpha werewolf looking downright hangdog.
"I did?"
She raised both eyebrows at him.
"I did. — Gail Carriger

Michael Koryta isn't just one of the finest authors working in the crime genre today. He's simply one of today's finest authors, period. His stories are taut, compelling, and beautifully rendered. His understanding of human nature-the good, the evil, and all the gray between-is masterful. THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD is Koryta at his best. — William Kent Krueger

If one morning in the Spring, a stranger came and said to me, Your mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, lover, friend, is dead. From a b-52, napalm bombing, search and destroy mission, air attack, Tet offensive, My Lai massacre, failed escape, I would not scream but make of my body a net, a tarp, stretched taut across the sky, the sea, over every village and hamlet. Prepared to catch everything from the sky, shade everything on the ground, rain water and receive you, war, with arms outstretched. — Le Thi Diem Thuy

Alienation and loneliness became a cable that stretched hundreds of miles long, pulled to the breaking point by a gigantic winch. And through that taut line, day and night, he received indecipherable messages. — Haruki Murakami

He brought his lips to my ear. "I would have been gentle with you, though." I shuddered as I closed my eyes. Every inch of my body went taut as his words echoed through me. "I would have had you moaning my name throughout it all. And I would have taken a very, very long time, Feyre. — Sarah J. Maas

I try to give him a dirty look, but I can't help but laugh. "Yes, I'm laughing at you." Raffe pulls me closer and kisses me again. I melt into his taut body. I can't help myself. I'm not even sure I should try. My whole world turns into Raffe sensations as our lips explore each other. — Susan Ee

David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that's both erotic and hypnotic ... — Miriam Toews

Lorcan rose to his feet, swaying again. But Elide was there. And there was nothing of the young woman he'd come to know in her pale, taut face. Nothing of her in the raw voice as Elide said to Lorcan, "I hope you spend the rest of your miserable, immortal life suffering. I hope you spend it alone. I hope you live with regret and guilt in your heart and never find a way to endure it." Then — Sarah J. Maas

When the United States wants cheap labor, Mexicans respond. When the employment market north of the border is glutted, the barbed wire gets taut, the border patrols fix bayonets, the vigilantes get busy, and the walls go up. — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

For those poor souls who can only think of the terrible fear and danger of a runaway horse, think of this: a speed like water flowing over stone, a skimming sensation that hovers and dips while the world spins around and the wind drags your skin taut across your bones. You can close your eyes and lose yourself in the rhythm, because nothing you do or shout or wish for will happen until the running makes up its mind to stop. So you hold steady, balancing yourself in the wake, and unhook your mind from the everyday while you sit at the silent center of it all and hope that the feeling won't stop till you're good and ready for life to be ordinary once more. — Meg Rosoff

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often - in fact, mostly - at the expense of everything else in my life. — Stan Getz

He folded back the hem of her housedress. Peeled the wet underpants from her skin and moved them down over her pale knees and her small feet and then dropped them on the floor. He could hear the voices of the children playing in the tree outside. He gently pushed her thighs apart and saw immediately that the baby had already begun to crown. Her skin was paler than his wife's was, even in midwinter. He gave her his hand to get her through the next contraction, keeping his arm steady as she squeezed. He spread the fingers of the other over her taut belly. Mr. Persichetti wore a silver Saint Christopher's medal around his neck and kept a Sacred Heart scapular in his pocket, but when Mary Keane asked him, catching her breath, "Who's the patron saint of women in labor?" he shrugged. He told her he only knew Saint Dymphna was the patron of the insane. He'd had the — Alice McDermott

What I remember best from those times is the music itself. When it succeded, we took hold of the audience's attention, working it from a distracted, unshaped mass into spun beauty, passing the fine strands back and forth until we wove together something grander, not only music but memory, too-the particulars of past and present, stretched taut across a loom of timeless ideals. Harmony. Symmetry. Order. — Andromeda Romano-Lax

Later, when they would spend straight hours conversing in the dark, Jane would realize that Henry kissed the way he talked- his entire attention taut, focused, intensely hers. — Shannon Hale

In one of our concert grand pianos, 243 taut strings exert a pull of 40,000 pounds on an iron frame. It is proof that out of great tension may come great harmony. — Theodore E. Steinway

With restraint she didn't realize she had, she tore her mouth from his.
He let out a growl of protest, his eyes dark and filled with hunger. The thought of getting devoured by him had all her muscles pulling taut.
"I don't want to be with your brother," she blurted.
She'd come to terms with the fact that when she mated it might be with two males. Unlike some of her friends, she'd adjusted to that part of this culture. But she and Con weren't getting mated and she didn't want to be with anyone else. She needed that to be clear to him.
"Good." The word came out as a rumble. "Do you want to be with anyone else?"
Did he seriously have to ask?
She shook her head.
He nipped at her jaw. "Say it." A soft, dominant demand.
Another rush of heat flooded her at the command in his tone.
"No. Just you."

-Leilani & Con — Savannah Stuart

tee that stretched taut against his powerful — Kate Meader

Society, because it is composed of living humans, is organic and if healthy, supple. It is like a rubber band. As long as the groups that compose society are flexible and social and emotionally supporting, it serves its constituency well. It bends, weaves, twists, turns, and envelops everyone in diverse manners. If opposing forces become too locked into their polarized viewpoints, though, other things happen.

Like two grumpy siblings, they hold their views with anger or self-righteousness and utter vulgar and crass words, but it amounts to the same thing. The two groups pull on the rubber band and rigidly hold to their position without empathy.

The rubber band (society) grows taut and then eventually it snaps and collateral damage ensues and the proverbial baby is thrown out with the bath water. — Leviak B. Kelly

I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring. Had it not been for the fear that I was going crazy, I would have found it an interesting experience, a trip such as no drug could possibly produce. Asleep and dreaming, I saw dead men living; awake, I saw living men dead. — Philip Caputo

If Murakami's novels are grand enigmas, his stories are bite-sized conundrums. ( ... ) The great pleasure of the new story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, is watching Murakami come at his obsessions from so many different angles. There's a panoply of strangeness between these covers ( ... ) This collection shows Murakami at his dynamic, organic best. As a chronicler of contemporary alienation, a writer for the Radiohead age, he shows how taut and thin our routines have become, how ill-equipped we are to contend with the forces that threaten to disrupt us. — Antoine Wilson

The gentler and kinder the god, the more harsh and cruel its worshippers, for they hold to their conviction with taut certainty, febrile in its extremity, and so cannot abide dissenters. They will kill, they will torture, in that god's name. And see in themselves no conflict, no matter how bloodstained their hands. — Steven Erikson

The Apache wrenched his pony's head around and when Glanton spun to look at his men he found them frozen in deadlock with the savages, they and their arms wired into a construction taut and fragile as those puzzles wherein the placement of each piece is predicated upon every other and they in turn so that none can move for bringing down the structure entire. — Cormac McCarthy

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. — Nathanael West

The sight of a scorpion as big as her hand had her scrambling back . . . wedging herself firmly against MacRieve - a very awkward position to be in with anyone, but especially with a werewolf.
He stiffened all around her. Every inch of him. She felt his arms bulging over her shoulders and his chiseled abs taut over her back.
His growing erection strained thick against her backside. So the rumors about male werewolves are true, she thought dazedly. Exhibit A is quite insistent.
"Move forward," he said, grating the words. He was breathing heavily right over her ear.
"No way. Kind of between a scorpion and a hard place here." She bit her lip, wishing one of her friends had heard her say that. — Kresley Cole

The force that makes the winter grow Its feathered hexagons of snow , and drives the bee to match at home Their calculated honeycomb, Is abacus and rose combined. An icy sweetness fills my mind , A sense that under thing and wing Lies, taut yet living , coiled, the spring . — Jacob Bronowski

If you haven't realized it yet, I am seducing you, not the other way around."
God, he loved this woman. Sean slid alongside her gestured to his body, his muscles as taut as they were after he'd been an hour or more in the sparring ring. "I am at your service m'lady." A groan of desire rumbled from his chest. — Amy Jarecki

People are supposed to be lean. You can't be too thin, everybody says so, especially anorexics. People are supposed to be lean and taut, because that's how men generally are, lean and taut, or anyhow that's how a lot of men start out and some of them even stay that way. And men are people, people are men, that has been well established, and so people, real people, the right kind of people, are lean. But I'm really lousy at being people, because I'm not lean at all but sort of podgy, with actual fat places. I am untaut. — Ursula K. Le Guin

When the music comes, you try to see it shining between your eyes. Like threads stretched taut and the notes as colored beads threaded on. When you get very good, it's as if you can see inside the music, through it. You bring the music alive, bring it into being. As if you're the one composing. — Anna Smaill

Morpheus snatches both of my necklaces from my fingers, holding the delicate links taut enough that I can't struggle without breaking them. "Were he to pay more attention to you instead of his precious career" - he drapes the charms over a palm and, using his gloved forefinger and thumb, positions the tiny key in place atop the heart's keyhole - "perhaps then he would be attuned to your needs and desires." Holding my gaze, he makes a show of how the key's teeth aren't the right shape for the heart's opening. "As it stands, he's just not the right fit. — A.G. Howard

Constance is lying naked on her bed - naked except for five bracelets, two necklaces and an anklet (she never her wears rings if sex is in the air). One lithe arm is curled around her purple halo of hair while the other lies dormant on her taut belly (it will be three years before there'll be a baby in there). Scents of verbena and lemons rise from her warm pink skin. She rolls over, revealing her voluptuous posterior to a man who is watching her from a window across the way, and reaches for a book under her bed. — Marie Wilson

I reach around his body and cup his ass. When my hand finds the toy lodged there, I groan into his mouth. "Do it," he pants. Everything begins to happen very fast. With a firm grasp, I remove the toy, while Wes slicks up my dick. He yanks me off the sofa's back and braces himself against it. "Go," he orders. I come up behind him and grip his hips, the head of my cock sliding between his taut ass cheeks. Just like the other night, I'm floored by the sensation of being skin to skin. There's no barrier between my throbbing dick and his tight ass, and when I drive deep on the first stroke, we both groan with abandon. "Fuck me," he demands when I go still. But I'm too busy savoring the incredible feeling of being inside him without a condom. I roll my hips and he growls like a grumpy bear. "I swear to God, Canning, if you don't move, I'm gonna - " I pull out, then slam right back in. He makes a choked sound, his entire body trembling. "You're gonna what?" I ask mockingly. — Sarina Bowen

Becoming Richard Pryor is a compulsively readable book that sets a new gold standard for American biography. Scott Scaul's research is extraordinary; his writing is taut, elegant, and insightful; and he captures both the hilarity and pain that made Richard Pryor such a towering figure, — Debby Applegate

And in the summer we would line up three sand dollars John and I had found on our second date when we walked along the ocean holding hands, both of us taut with the knowledge the we had found The One- though neither of us admitted it until much later. It was the same beach where I scattered his ashes. It is good we don't know our own futures. — Elizabeth Berg

The Adoption When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates. They had arrived in San Francisco, where their ship was decommissioned, and Paul bet that he would find himself a wife within two weeks. He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean. But it wasn't his looks that got him a date with Clara Hagopian, a sweet-humored daughter of Armenian immigrants. It was the fact that he and his friends had a car, unlike — Walter Isaacson

I do not like the killers, and the killing bravely and well crap. I do not like the bully boys, the Teddy Roosevelt's, the Hemingways, the Ruarks. They are merely slightly more sophisticated versions of the New Jersey file clerks who swarm into the Adirondacks in the fall, in red cap, beard stubble and taut hero's grin, talking out of the side of their mouths, exuding fumes of bourbon, come to slay the ferocious white-tailed deer. It is the search for balls. A man should have one chance to bring something down. He should have his shot at something, a shining running something, and see it come a-tumbling down, all mucus and steaming blood stench and gouted excrement, the eyes going dull during the final muscle spasms. And if he is, in all parts and purposes, a man, he will file that away as a part of his process of growth and life and eventual death. And if he is perpetually, hopelessly a boy, he will lust to go do it again, with a bigger beast. — John D. MacDonald

Several fireboat men were trying to board the burning ferry. They had no apparent reason to do so, for all the passengers were either dead or saved and the firemen could not hope to extinguish the flames simply by being closer to them. Why then were they working their way hand over hand on an alternately slack and taut rope that had started to burn, and dipped them now and then into the freezing river as the crowd took in its breath all at once? Peter Lake knew. They took power from the fire. The closer they fought it, the stronger they became. The firemen knew that though it sometimes killed them, the fire gave them priceless gifts. — Mark Helprin

I made lasagna for dinner," Tamsyn called out. "That work for you?"
He continued to look at her, as if he'd drink her up with his eyes. "Anything is fine."
"Maybe I shouldn't waste my lasagna on you, then." Tamsyn grabbed a container from the cooling unit. "How about some cardboard instead?"
Brenna found herself amused in spite of the blood that continued to scent the air and the taut expectation that stretched between her and Judd. Lips twitching, she waited for his response.
"Cardboard has no nutritional value." Utterly toneless. "Lasagna would be a better choice. — Nalini Singh

Gritty and witty, The Chicago Way is done the classic Raymond Chandler Way. Harvey's taut plot, snappy prose, and memorable characters make this debut novel a real winner. — Kathy Reichs

Darona's face bore the pinched, taut look and shadowed eyes of someone constantly in pain, but the lack of lines suggested she was younger than Jesral had first thought; middle-aged, fifty at the very most.
'You make an uncommonly fine looking noblewoman, for a Mhrydaineg commoner.'
'Thank you.' Jesral was careful to keep all tone out of her voice. Darona gave her a shrewd stare, then a slight smile.
'Self-control. Good. You must ignore me when I offend you unintentionally. They say that pain can make one waspish, but my brothers and son tell me there's been no change in my manner. I was acid-tongued long before this set in,' she held up a knotted hand, 'and taking devil's claw root has no effect on that. Rest assured, young woman, when I intend offence people are in no doubt about it. — Helen Bell

A creature
a frightfully, awful creature
was mere feet from her. Its eyes were enormous, the size of goose eggs and milky white. Its gray, slippery skin was stretched taut upon its face. Its mouth was wide and full of needle teeth. Its hands rested on the rock, hands that were webbed and huge with each finger ending in a sharp, curved nail. It was as tall as a human man, yet oddly shrunken and hunched. — M.L. LeGette

What a rare joy it is to linger in the lucid, transcendent worlds of Jennifer Maier's poems. In taut, precise language and lapidary images, Now, Now explores myriad pathways of connection, the ways desire, longing, and imaginative possibility brush up against the everyday, revealing a keen, fiercely compassionate intelligence-a sensibility so finely attuned and so clearly in love with the world that you would follow it almost anywhere. — Rick Hilles

Dustfinger inspected his reddened fingers and felt the taut skin. 'He might tell me how my story ends,' he murmured.
Meggie looked at him in astonishment. 'You mean you don't know?'
Dustfinger smiled. Meggie still didn't particularly like his smile. It seemed to appear only to hide something else. 'What's so unusual about that, princess?' he asked quietly. 'Do you know how your story ends?'
Meggie had no answer for that. — Cornelia Funke

The backs of his hands remind him of paper burning in the fireplace, the moment the taut membrane goes slack into a thousand wrinkles, just before it withers to ash and air. — Barbara Kingsolver

You can always tell when a town has gone bad. People gather in little groups, talking in low voices. Their postures are taut and awkward. They have the look of those who have been brushed by brutality and do not know how to cope with it - a look of shame, as if they had somehow caused the violence that frightens them. — Patrick Buchanan

His attention seemed tied to her face by a taut string. — John Steinbeck

There's something I want you to know,' said Cherryl, her voice taut and harsh, 'so that there won't be any pretending about it. I'm not going to put on the sweet relative act. I know what you've done to Jim and how you've made him miserable all his life. I'm going to protect him against you. I'll put you in your place. I'm Mrs. Taggart. I'm the woman in this family now.'
'That's quite all right,' said Dagny. 'I'm the man. — Ayn Rand

Across the gulf of centuries, the blind smile of Homer is turned upon our age. Along the echoing corridors of time, the roar of the rockets merges now with the creak of the wind-taut rigging. For somewhere in the world today, still unconscious of his destiny, walks the boy who will be the first Odysseus of the Age of Space. — Arthur C. Clarke

He has presumably never observed a real wolf closely, otherwise he might have seen that animals too have no such things as unified souls; that the beautiful, taut frames of their bodies house a whole variety of aspirations and states of mind; that wolves suffer too, having dark depths within them. Oh no, human beings are always desperately mistaken and bound to suffer when they try to get 'back to nature'. Harry can never fully become a wolf again, and if he did he would realize that even wolves are not simple and primitive creatures but complex and many-sided. Wolves also have two and more than two souls in their wolves' breasts, and anyone desiring to be a wolf is guilty of the same kind of forgetfulness as the man who sings 'What bliss still to be a child!'1 — Hermann Hesse

As he shook off his servant's grip and staggered heavily to his feet, the sunlight streaming through the outside door struck him full in the face.

Samantha gasped.

A fresh scar, still red and angry, bisected the corner of his left eye and descended down his cheek in a jagged lightning bolt, drawing the skin around it taut. It had once been an angel's face with the sort of masculine beauty reserved only for princes and seraphim. — Teresa Medeiros

If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad. There is so much, and I am torn in different directions, pulled thin, taut against horizons too distant for me to reach. To stop with the German tribes and rest awhile: But no! On, on, on. Through ages of empires, of decline and fall. Swift, ceaseless pace. Will I never rest in sunlight again - slow, languid & golden with peace? — Sylvia Plath

You never have a guarantee of tomorrow. Everyone's thread is held taut, just waiting for that last scissor cut to sever at any given moment. Live your life in the way you should live it, and look at your troubles as tests of faith. They build your character, like gold being tried by the fire; getting rid of all its faults. — Jennifer Megan Varnadore

WHEN I STILL USED, I WAS ONCE WORKING IN IBIZA, HEDONISM capital of the nineties and the turn of the millennium. People swayed in sweaty swathes and stayed, pilled-up for days. I couldn't participate, because I was too shy or broken, caught on some taut barbed wire in my mind. Me and my mate Matt, high one night, lost ourselves, found ourselves in a wood and pretended to be animals. It was just us, and we prowled and circled around. We locked eyes and growled and danced. "Let's pretend we're animals" was forgotten, and we were animals. We are animals. We are free animals with a divine spark, we're not in a farm or a zoo or a theme park, we're free. We've forgotten that we're free. — Russell Brand

The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen. — Cormac McCarthy

The Eleventh Plague hits disturbingly close to home An excellent, taut debut novel. — Suzanne Collins

He dragged his mouth along her jaw. She smelled so good, so feminine. He moved his mouth to her neck, and instantly, she went taut and recoiled. Right. He was a vampire. Worth about as much as a stray dog. And this stray dog was humping her leg. She must be mortified. Fucking humiliating. He shoved himself off her, averting his gaze so she wouldn't see the color change in his eyes that signified arousal. She was too aware of his desire as it was, and he was an idiot for letting it go as far as it had. With a curse, he grabbed up his ruined shirt. It was bloody, dirty, and torn to shit. It wasn't wearable, but he put it to good use while he waited for his heart rate and breathing to return to pre-hump-the-enemy levels. — Larissa Ione

All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us. — Shirley Jackson

The Warrior of the Light knows that it is impossible to live in a state of complete relaxation.
He has learned from the archer that, in order to shoot his arrow any distance, he must hold the bow taut. He has learned from the stars that only an inner explosion allows them to shine. The Warrior notices that when a horse is about to jump over a fence, it tenses all its muscles.
But he never confuses tension with anxiety. — Paulo Coelho

At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east ... Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them ... We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn't get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them ... My father said, I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I'm glad to know that. — Marilynne Robinson

...My taut heart
lurches heavily, like a sack in a cart, clattering
downhill, towards a cliff, towards an abyss!
It can't be stopped! — Vladimir Nabokov

Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility ... — Ayn Rand

Hunter's stomach was perfection - each taut muscle tight and totally lickable. Not that I'd ever licked a man's stomach before, but now I got why someone would want to. I was in six-pack heaven. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

It's just a trickle at first, dark hallways, empty rooms, but then Angela sees a face. Eyes wide, nostrils flaring, a little girl's mouth covered with taut rope. The room is damp and cold and simple, a chair in the middle of it all. That's where the girl sits in a yellow dress, hands bound, hair wet with sweat and feet dangling off the floor. The chair's much too big for her, and something's coming. Something bad. — E.M. Blomqvist

Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. Tod — Nathanael West

Dominic reached behind his head and tugged on his T-shirt. The rising fabric revealed his abdomen. And yeah, he liked the way her gaze followed the hemline. But his arm stilled, his bicep taut and his T-shirt covering his hair. If he kept going, she'd see the damaged skin on his chest from where the bullet had entered.

"Are you sure about this?" he asked. "My scars aren't pretty."

"I promise to focus on your abs," she murmured without looking up. "And lower. — Sara Jane Stone

You will be glad to know that Mary has made something special for dinner."
"Something edible, I hope."
Her lips twitched. "Absolutely."
"Then it's doubly a pity that I don't want dinner this evening." The hunger that roared through him had nothing to do with food.
"No dinner? But Mary-"
"Are you hungry?"
She gave an odd flicker of a smile. "I couldn't eat anything now if my life depended on it."
Her admission relaxed his taut nerves. She was as affected as he was. Good. That's how it should be. — Karen Hawkins

He'd been an odd one, that boy with the camera. Such a distinctive physique: pale skin so taut on his skeleton, holding himself with a shy hunch, not ugly as such but certainly not handsome, with a demeanor eager to cause no trouble, to attract no attention. — Ali Shaw

But baby, you started this." The hand on her hip tugged her closer, her inner thighs brushing against the smooth fabric pulled taut over his long legs.
She tugged at the fingers on her hip, wriggling at the same time, desperate to escape. "And now I'm ending it."
"I'll decide where it ends," he said. — Tracey Alvarez

The guitar. Rubbing the gentle polish
On Every smooth contour.
On the lap. Knowing every curve
As the light shines from it.

On stage a planned metamorphosis
Takes places as the hours go by and the
Space is transformed to a concert hall.
The energetic nemesis has struck.

The risers are transformed into a stage
And black boxes turned into powerful
Pieces of sound equipment.
The spring is taut.

Backstage while pandemonium
Sweeps the hall and people
Crowd the arena as ants flow to a cake.

The stage is set, the
Instruments tuned and placed.
The musicians work out last minute
Kinks as the lights dim.

An intense force hits the spectators.
Energy is released in every form.
A power rage beyond comprehension. — David Morrell

The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. — Nathanael West

He slouched back in his seat, looking tired, and leaned his face on his shoulder to look at me while he played with my hair. He started to hum a song, and then, after a few bars, he sang it. Quietly, sort of half-sung, half-spoken, incredibly gentle. I didn't catch all the words, but it was about his summer girl. Me. Maybe his forever girl. His yellow eyes were half-lidded as he sang, and in that golden moment, hanging taut in the middle of an icecovered landscape like a single bubble of summer nectar, I could see how my life could be stretched out in front of me. — Maggie Stiefvater

How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted. How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future. — Carol Shields

I have nothing but admiration for myself as a youngster; I was a force to be reckoned with then, a much finer specimen than I am now. As kids, we had little meat on our bones; we were sticklike figures with big rounded bellies, the skin stretched so taut it was nearly transparent - you could just about see our intestines twist and coil on the other side. Our necks were so long and thin it was a miracle they could support our heavy heads. — Mo Yan

Sometimes it seems to me that I shall never write out all the books I have in my head, because of the strain. The devilish thing about writing is that it calls upon every nerve to hold itself taut. This is exactly what I cannot do
— Virginia Woolf

He was getting undressed and it snapped something inside of him that had been drawing taut, ready to break for months.
"I'm hungry, Bruno," he said, in a soft voice, as he removed the shirt from his broad shoulders, revealing a perfect sight of smooth dark skin. "I can't wait for dinner," he continued, with a smile.
When he put his hands to the fastening of his trousers, Bruno let out a sigh and put the take out menus on the counter. He couldn't look at him, because he knew Lyon was trying to seduce him on purpose. He didn't want to talk or hear him out or spend time with him that didn't end with an orgasm.
"I can't do this anymore," Bruno confessed, quietly. — Elaine White

When he stepped into the shower, the hit water scalded him. He let it run over his face, burning his eyelids. He put up with the pain, his jaw clenched and his muscles taut, suppressing the urge to howl with loneliness in the suffocating steam. For four years, one month, and twelve days, Nikon always got into the shower with him after they made love and soaped his back slowly, interminably. And often she put her arms around him, like a little girl in the rain. One day I'll leave without ever really knowing you. You'll remember my big, dark eyes. The reproachful silences. The moans of anxiety as I slept. The nightmares you couldn't save me from. You'll remember all this when I'm gone. — Arturo Perez-Reverte

He touched me with such reverence, his fingertips light and curious as they cruised up my spine while his mouth was bold and knowing, his tongue lavishing taut, puckered skin with deadly precision. — Linda Kage

Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn from you, love you, bless you before you depart. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may, for it may not always be so. One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky and want, more than all the world, your return. — Mary Jean Irion

For my part, I like live theater best when it's taut, concentrated and intimate. — Terry Teachout

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper. — D.H. Lawrence

Charles made an effort. "Well," he said, "right now they're preparing for the shrouds to be warped from the hounds of the mast to the channels on the sides of the ship. The deadeyes will be turned in with a left-handed thread seizing, properly whipped and capped. They'll be made taut by the throat seizings, and attached to the turnbuckles on the mizzen chains. The ratlines will be seized horizontally across the shrouds with clove hitches in between and eyes spliced at the ends. That will make the ladderway for the topmen to climb up and down the mast." He — Jay Worrall

A piano tuner used to come over to our house when I was young. He was a blind man, his eyes burnt-out holes in his head, his body all bent. I remember how strange he looked against the grandeur of our lives, how he stooped over that massive multitoothed instrument and tweaked its tones. The piano never looked any different after he'd worked on it, but when I pressed a C key or the black bar of an F minor, the note sprung out richer, as though chocolate and spices had been added to a flat sound. This was what was different. It was as though I'd been visited by a blind piano tuner who had crept into my apartment at night, who had tweaked the ivory bones of my body, the taut strings in my skull, and now, when I pressed on myself, the same notes but with a mellower, fuller sound sprang out. — Lauren Slater

Until the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day. The color change in Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in the heat the flesh comes to resemble coal-tar, especially where it has been broken or torn, and it has quite a visible tarlike iridescence. The dead grow larger each day until sometimes they become quite too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem blown tight enough to burst. The individual members may increase in girth to an unbelievable extent and faces fill as taut and globular as balloons. — Ernest Hemingway,

His long fingers curled around the back of her lace thong, pulling the material taut against her wet fold. "I'm a big guy, and you know I always deliver. — Avery Flynn

The golden thread of reason that used to be stretched taut to mark the boundary between the known and the unknown is now routinely disrespected. — Al Gore

Judge's arms was stretched out the entire width of the bed, as if his body were being offered up for sacrifice. His fists clenched the sides of the mattress as his orgasm burst out of hiding, barreling to the surface. His body locked up tight, every muscle flexed and taut. Judge grimaced and groaned at the intense pleasure. "Fuck. I feel you, Judge. Come with me, come with me," Michaels crooned. Rubbing Judge everywhere he could reach. "Your body is so gorgeous." "Austin," Judge whispered shakily, when lightning shot through his balls and the first jet of come made him jerk hard enough to almost knock Michaels off him. Heat spread beneath him, soaking through the sheets and probably into the mattress. He shook violently with each release, his orgasm riding him as hard as Michaels was. "Fuck. — A.E. Via

There is only continual motion. If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad. There is so much, and I am torn in different directions, pulled thin, taut against horizons too distant for me to reach. Swift, ceaseless pace. Will I never rest in sunlight again - slow, languid & golden with peace? — Sylvia Plath

Shakespeare's felicity is so often taught
it is easy to overlook how taut
the sinews in his neck must
have been when he grasped his pen, or the musk
that exuded from the fat of his chin
below a somewhat chthonic grin
life wrestled death on his desk when he composed. — B.J. Ward

Her hair was matted to her head, glistening dark red, like wine through a murky bottle. Her torn shirt hung loose, a breast carelessly exposed, and her breeches were taut against the lean muscles of her legs. She treaded through the waves, never swaying in the current, until she stood before him, face concealed in shadow. "You swim faster with one arm than I with two," she said.
Nathan laughed. "You frightened me. — Matt Tomerlin

Grabbing his very fine, very taut ass in my hands, I squeezed. "I need more coffee to deal with your gift, ace."
Chapter 8, pg 131 — Sylvia Day

Her magic sent him sprawling, and it then hurled into Rhysand again - so hard that his head cracked against the stones and the knife dropped from his splayed fingers. No one made a move to help him, and she struck him once more with her power. The red marble splintered where he hit it, spiderwebbing toward me. With wave after wave she hit him. Rhys groaned.
"Stop," I breathed, blood filling my mouth as I strained a hand to reach her feet. "Please."
Rhys's arms buckled as he fought to rise, and blood dripped from his nose, splattering on the marble. His eyes met mine.
The bond between us went taut. I flashed between my body and his, seeing myself through his eyes, bleeding and broken and sobbing.
I snapped back into my own mind as Amarantha turned to me again. "Stop? Stop? Don't pretend you care, human," she crooned, and curled her finger. I arched my back, my spine straining to the point of cracking, and Rhysand bellowed my name as I lost my grip on the room. — Sarah J. Maas

You're carrying on as if I am being chased by hordes of men, when that is obviously not the case. At Stony Cross Park, men went out of their way to avoid my company - and you were one of them!"
The charge, though true, seemed to startle Sebastian. His face became taut, and he stared at her in stony silence. "You hardly made it easy for anyone to approach you," he said after a moment. "A man's vanity is more fragile than you might think. It's easy for us to mistake shyness for coldness, and silence for indifference. You could have exerted yourself a bit, you know. One brief meeting between the two of us ... one smile from you ... was all the encouragement I would have needed to jump on you like a grouse on laurel. — Lisa Kleypas

Creep" I said, cutting to the heart of the matter. - Stephanie
"Gosh, I wonder who this could be."
- Morelli
"You lied to me. I knew it too. I knew right from the beginning, you jerk."
Silence stretched taut between us, and I realized my accusation covered a lot of territory, so I narrowed the field.
"I want to knew about this big secret case you're working on, and I want to know how it ties in to Kenny Mancuso and Moogey Bues." - Stephanie
"Oh" Morelli said. "That lie " - Morelli
"Well?" - Stephanie
"I cant tell you anything about that lie" - Morelli
-Two For The Dough — Janet Evanovich

You don't have to be young. You don't have to be thin. You don't have to be "hot" in a way that some dumbfuckedly narrow mindset has construed that word. You don't have to have taut flesh or a tight ass or an eternally upright set of tits. You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve. You have to take off all of your clothes and say, "I'm right here." There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It's the one place we can't leave. We're there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn't, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn't do that? That's the question you need to answer, — Cheryl Strayed

Not that the man needed clothes. God meant for that piece of perfection to have nothing masking the luscious, tanned flesh stretched taut over beautiful muscles. — Rena Marks