Tendril Quotes & Sayings

For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph. — Thomas Mann

That's it. It's all going to end.
The realization wasn't crushing. It was gentle, like a final tendril of smoke from a dying candle. — Brandon Sanderson

We are made for art ... The moment Maddy took up the tendril phrase, Els knew she was as dear to him as his own life. Talons gripped his ribs, and he felt a joy bordering on panic. He needed to know how this woman would unfold. He needed to write music that would settle into her range like frost on fields. They'd spend their years together, grow old, get sick, die in shared bewilderment. — Richard Powers

And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant — J.M. Coetzee

Victory won't come
to me unless I go
to it; a grape tendril
ties a knot in knots till
knotted thirty times — Marianne Moore

She was a sentinel for a reason - she was fit, lethal, and well able to take down most men twice her size. Not including Riley. Her teeth bared at the way he'd pinned her - maybe she'd enjoyed it last night, but if the wolf tried to use that to change the balance of power in the sentinel-lieutenant relationship between them, things would get seriously ugly. Her mind filled with images of him blocking her punches, trying not to hurt her. She squelched the tiny tendril of warmth that threatened to rise to the surface — Nalini Singh

I think Illium can take care of himself."
"Not if he keeps flirting with you."
A fine, almost elegant tendril of heat, champagne and sunshine, decadence in the light.
"Raphael's not the sharing kind. — Nalini Singh

If we are really serious about preventing another crisis like the 2008 meltdown, we should simply ban complex financial instruments unless they can be unambiguously shown to benefit society in the long run. — Ha-Joon Chang

His gentleness twined another tendril around her heart, until she was so entangled in him, she knew she'd never break free. For the first time in her life, her wolf had chosen. And it had chosen this lone wolf. "You have me," she whispered. All of me. — Nalini Singh

It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. What man could have fabricated a Jesus? None but a Jesus. — Theodore Parker

Another man's property or not, Creed could not walk away from this and ignore it. He draped an arm around her and drew her to him so that her cheek rested against his thigh. His other hand stroked the top of her head, his fingers tangling through her soft hair. He was large in comparison to her, and he did not wish for her to be frightened by him again, so he sent a faint tendril of compulsion to belay her fear while he whispered a few nonsensical words of comfort. — Paula Altenburg

Oh, September! It is so soon for you to lose your friends to good work and strange loves and high ambitions. The sadness of that is too grown-up for you. Like whiskey and voting, it is a dangerous and heady business, as heavy as years. If I could keep your little tribe together forever, I would. I do so want to be generous. But some stories sprout bright vines that tendril off beyond our sight, carrying the folk we love best with them, and if I knew how to accept that with grace, I would share the secret. — Catherynne M Valente

It is the branch that bears the fruit, That feels the knife, To prune it for a larger growth, A fuller life. Though every budding twig be trimmed, And every grace Of swaying tendril, springing leaf, May lose its place. O you whose life of joy seems left, With beauty shorn; Whose aspirations lie in dust, All bruised and torn, Rejoice, though each desire, each dream, Each hope of thine Will fall and fade; it is the hand Of Love Divine That holds the knife, that cuts and breaks With tenderest touch, That you, whose life has borne some fruit, Might now bear much. Annie Johnson Flint — Lettie B. Cowman

I still don't even know for sure what a tendril is. — Thomas Pynchon

Who are you?" she said, barely able to hear her own words as her heartbeat thrummed in her ears.
"This is your dream, remember? Tell me who I am," he said smiling, absently coiling a tendril of her long brown hair around a finger.
She narrowed her eyes at him. "If this is my dream, oneiroi, then answer my question. Who are you?"
He was hearing her true voice: that of a natural ruler. She watched him smile at her fearlessness, even as he loomed over her. He leaned down and whispered in her ear, "I am your lord husband. — Rachel Alexander

Theorems are not to mathematics what successful courses are to a meal. — Gian-Carlo Rota

The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell preexist in the secreting organs of the fish. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The other ninja righted himself and moved beside her. "Any last words?" he asked.
I rolled my eyes. Why did people always ask you that before they killed you? It wasn't like you were going to say something that would make them change their minds.
"Yes," I answered. The first tendril of power pushed though my wound and wisped the hair around my head. If I was going down, at least I would take them down with me. "Why did the chicken cross the road."
She hesitated and glanced at the guy. Her eyes were scrunched in a way that I knew she was frowning under her mask. The other ninja looked at her and shrugged.
I licked my dry lips. "To escape the onslaught of exploding ki headed his way. — Cole Gibsen

Application when it comes to understanding the mysteries of creation or the fact that light can enter the eye and form an image in the brain and send a poetic tendril down the arm into a clutch of fingers that could write the Shakespearean sonnets. — James Lee Burke

Come forth, old man,
thy daughter's side
Is now the fitting place for thee:
When time has quell'd the oak's bold pride,
The youthful tendril yet may hide,
The ruins of the parent tree. — Walter Scott

Lord Sheffield tucked a stray tendril behind her ear and cupped her cheek in one hand. "Do you see a kissing ball anywhere?" "N-no." She darted a quick glance about the room. It was decorated as a Venetian masquerade, not as a Christmastide celebration. There was no holly to be found. "Why do you ask?" "Because I don't want you to think I have any reason for doing this other than because I wish to. — Erica Ridley

Do you know where Jason is?" she asked Dmitri when they exited the morgue. Dmitri pressed the car remote to unlock the flame red Ferrari parked in the employees-only lot. "Tired of your Bluebell already?" A tendril of champagne circled around her senses, cut with something far harder. Never had she felt that harsh edge in Dmitri's scent. She pitied the woman he took to his bed today.
"Yeah, that's it. I'm building a harem. — Nalini Singh

She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen's lunch and tilted her head to finger a stray, but not very stray, tendril of softly glowing hair. Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice. — Raymond Chandler

I struggled to keep one foot in music and one in academia. I had worked on my Ph.D. for three years full time before I realized Bad Religion could be a legitimate career. — Greg Graffin

I love you," he murmured. "Oh, Bree, I do love you." She didn't answer, but a hand floated up from the dark and lay along his cheek, gentle as a tendril of seaweed. She kept it there while he took her, laid open in trust, while her other hand held his beating heart. — Diana Gabaldon

But they're bluffing. I defy even the bravest adult to spend the night in a place like Furnace in the pitch black without thinking that every noise is something right behind you with dagger teeth and eyes of silver and blood on its breath; that every whisper of air that runs over your skin is the rush of a descending blade; that every flicker of movement is a tendril of darkness wrapping itself around your throat and coiling in the pit of your belly, where it feasts on your soul. — Alexander Gordon Smith

Becky was a weed. Nobody ever wanted them taking over the bigger, prettier plants. People went to all extremes to make them go away. They sprayed poison, pulled until the roots gave way. They felt only like their garden was complete when every tendril was extirpated. This was how she felt from birth. — Ruth McLeod-Kearns

Your . . . sermon lasts but an hour or two - your life preaches all the week. — Warren W. Wiersbe

I am very grateful that I am in touch with so many different church groups. I am always very moved by the fact that so many people - practically over the spectrum of the Christian world - are responding to my writing. — Henri Nouwen

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world. — T. S. Eliot

Excited, on hearing your words o' man, as you shattered in yourself with pain,that occupied somewhere between your spirit and success.
I can bring out a reflection for you to keep - the inspiration that wanders to communicate my presence in your visible soul. It can hold you like a tendril to you only until the wake. — Nithin Purple

He reaches forward slowly, to lift the pen from my lax grip. Wearily I regard the faltering trail of ink it has tracked down my page. I have seen that shape before, I think, but it was not ink then. A trickle of drying blood on the deck of a Red-Ship, and mine the hand that spilled it? Or was it a tendril of smoke rising black against a blue sky as I rode too late to warn a village of a Red-Ship raid? Or poison swirling and unfurling yellowly in a simple glass of water, poison I had handed someone, smiling all the while? The artless curl of a strand of woman's hair left upon my pillow? Or the trail of a man's heels left in the sand as we dragged the bodies from the smoldering tower at Sealbay? The track of a tear down a mother's cheek as she clutched her Forged infant to her despite his angry cries? Like Red-Ships, the memories come without warning, without mercy. — Robin Hobb

What do you want from me? Am I to be some tool that people use to do magic? Is that my purpose in life?" "No, of course not!" Blaise protested, pushing away an unwelcome tendril of guilt. In a way, that had been exactly what he had originally intended for Gala, but she wasn't supposed to be a person, with the feelings and emotions of a human being. — Dima Zales