Thickening Quotes & Sayings

I thought how there was a kind of power in being needed. In having a purpose. I could feel it hardening up my bones and thickening my blood. — Carol Rifka Brunt

You have to have a certain kind of thickening of the hide. I mean, I'm not particularly worried about what other people think. If other people think that I was not the world's most perfect mother, they are completely right. — Anne Roiphe

It is a rule in paleontology that ornamentation and complication precede extinction. And our mutation, of which the assembly line, the collective farm, the mechanized army, and the mass production of food are evidences or even symptoms, might well correspond to the thickening armor of the great reptiles - a tendency that can end only in extinction. If this should happen to be true, nothing stemming from thought can interfere with it or bend it. Conscious thought seems to have little effect on the action or direction of our species. — John Steinbeck

She pursued his lips,' Zach laughs. 'Another one I misread! Pursued for "pursed." You know. She pursed her lips. So whenever you do that now, reach out and touch my lips to shut me up? I think, she pursued his lips.'

'That's so silly,' smiles Rachel.

'I know that. Now I'm pursuing your lips,' he adds.

When Zach kisses her, Rachel is often aware of the pulse in his lower labial, a small heartbeat there. She is aware of a pulsing and a slight thickening of tissue. How many times has this boy bled from his mouth? How many times. — Emma Richler

And that was all it took. They smiled at each other across the table, and some sort of shift occurred between them. There was a quickening, a livening- Frances could think of nothing to compare it to save some culinary process. It was like the white of an egg growing pearly in hot water, a milk sauce thickening in the pan. It was as subtle yet as tangible as that. — Sarah Waters

Coagulate, v.: It is a dangerous thing, this thickening of affection; you want it to have weight, but not to be an immovable burden. — David Levithan

If [science] tends to thicken the crust of ice on which, as it were, we are skating, it is all right. If it tries to find, or professes to have found, the solid ground at the bottom of the water it is all wrong. Our business is with the thickening of this crust by extending our knowledge downward from above, as ice gets thicker while the frost lasts; we should not try to freeze upwards from the bottom. — Samuel Butler

Howard adores Sam's looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. "I wonder what he's thinking," Howard will say.) — Chandler Burr

Few Come This Way

Few come this way; not that the darkness
Deters them, but they come
Reluctant here who fear to find,
Thickening the darkness, what they left behind
Sucking its cheeks before the fire at home,
The palsied Indecision from whose dancing head
Precipitately they fled, only to come again
Upon him here,
Clutching at the wrist of Venture with a cold
Hand, aiming to fall in with him, companion
Of the new as of the old. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Letter 17


Morning. The snow was falling outside. There was a white silence.
My mother and I sat facing my father at the dining room table.

There was something impenetrable about his gaze. It was like pack ice.

And the ice was thickening.

I could barely see into him.

I knew.
And they knew that I knew.

He was broken.

I did not even need to look at him.

I could feel his brokenness all thorough the room. — Gregory Colbert

And then they walk away together, out of the allotted grooves of their afternoons and into the thickening shadows of evening, into the dim, liminal place where on path is taken, and another missed. — Laura Barnett

I always blend my mascaras, since some are better at lengthening and others are better at thickening. — Kristinia DeBarge

If then this tendency toward collectivization is a mutation there is no reason to suppose it is for the better. It is a rule in paleontology that ornamentation and complication precede extinction. And our mutation, of which the assembly line, the collective farm, the mechanized army, and the mass production of food are evidences or even symptoms, might well correspond to the thickening armor of the great reptiles - a tendency that can end only in extinction. — John Steinbeck

When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if ... What if ... ' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot. — Patricia Highsmith

Meditators are shown to have thickening in parts of the brain structure that deal with attention, memory and sensory functions. This was found to be more noticeable in older, more practiced meditators than in younger adults which is interesting because this structure usually tends to get thinner as we age. — Philippa Perry

A brick could be used to cook with, as a thickening agent in gravy. But as history proves, the thickest agents work for the government as tax collectors. — Jarod Kintz

[A]s previous studies have concluded, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are probably thickening rather than melting. — Myron Ebell

I thought, too, about time. How fleet it is, and how certain, and like death how indifferent to our commentary upon it. Once not long before we had been boys and girls, and soon we would be middle-aged, thickening with rueful pleasure toward the thinness of old age. — Charles Finch

The monstrosity of this, reaching Smiley through a thickening wall of spiritual exhaustion, left him momentarily speechless. — John Le Carre

Now the piano makes a long, familiar run, the pianist playing different scales with each hand
what sounds like three hands, four
the harmonies like steadily thickening peals on a strand, and Werner sees six-year-old Jutta lean toward him, Frau Elena kneading bread in the background, a crystal radio in his lap, the cords of his soul not yet severed. — Anthony Doerr

They had Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to imperfectly registered color plate. It showed him holding a smeared palette with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o'-shanter which wasn't any too clean either. His other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be going to do a little work after a while, if somebody made a down payment. His face was aging, saggy, full of the disgust of life and the thickening effects of liquor. But it had a hard cheerfulness that I liked, and the eyes were as bright as drops of dew.
I was looking at him across my office desk at about four-thirty when the phone rang and I heard a cool, supercilious voice that sounded as if it thought it was pretty good. It said drawlingly, after I had answered:
You are Philip Marlowe, a private detective? — Raymond Chandler

Edward was dead. The magnitude of the news reverberated through me, thickening the air. His suffering was over. Yet what had he left behind? An England torn between Catholic and Protestant. — Ella March Chase

There were no ravens to be seen. Abruptly a fox burst out of the trees, running hard. Ravens poured from the branches after it. The beat of their wings almost drowned out a desperate whining from the fox. A black whirlwind dove and swirled around it. The fox's jaws snapped at them, but they darted in, and darted away untouched, black beaks glistening wetly. The fox turned back toward the trees, seeking the safety of its den. It ran awkwardly now, head low, fur dark and bloody, and the ravens flapped around it, more and more of them at once, the fluttering mass thickening until it hid the fox completely. As suddenly as they had descended the ravens rose, wheeled, and vanished over the next rise to the south. A misshapen lump of torn fur marked what had been the fox. — Robert Jordan

He began to read out loud. He did not read in the same clear way he recited his poems, but softly, sitting hunched over the table, the words breaking here and there under the burden of his new, thickening voice. "'Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?'" he read. "'Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father's knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. — Alice McDermott

I was extremely irritated being photographed for a long time, then I gave up caring. Photography is a nauseating cliche, but there is a lot to it. You can tell so much about a person from it. You are exaggerating the consciousness. It's life-thickening, photography. — Peter Beard

To love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again. — Ellen Bass

Everything I do for my private wellbeing adds another layer to my ego, and in thickening it insulates me more from God. Conversely, every act done without thought for myself diminishes my self-centeredness until finally no barrier remains to separate me from the Divine. The — Huston Smith

You know how summer goes. You yearn for it and yearn for it, but there's always something wrong. Everywhere you look, there are insects thickening the air, and birds rifling trees, and enormous, heavy leaves dragging down branches. You want to trammel it, wreck it, smash things down. The afternoons are so fat and long. You want to see if anything you do matters. * — Emily Fridlund

The pains in my heart don't go away these days. The heartaches are chronic; they layer on top of each other from one day to the next, thickening like a callus. — Eva Lesko Natiello

Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyone notices. — P. J. O'Rourke

Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data. — Djuna Barnes

Meat Glaze (demi-glace) It's handy to have meat glaze for thickening a pan sauce and giving it body. You can make your own meat glaze by cooking chicken broth down to a fraction of its original volume (definitely a weekend project), or you can buy commercial meat glaze. One of the better meat glazes is made by More-than-Gourmet, usually found in the gourmet section of the supermarket. Meat glaze can be stored in the refrigerator for several months and can be frozen indefinitely. — James Peterson

Can You Imagine?
For example, what the trees do
not only in lightening storms
or the watery dark of a summer's night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now - whenever
we're not looking. Surely you can't imagine
they don't dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade - surely you can't imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can't imagine
patience, and happiness, like that. — Mary Oliver

It seems mutants have something in their lives called gravy. They know truth, but it is buried under thickening and spices of convenience, materialism, insecurity, and fear. They also have something called frosting. It seems to represent how they spend almost all the seconds of their existence in doing superficial, artificial, temporary, pleasant-tasting, nice appearing projects and spend very few actual seconds of their lives developing their eternal beingness. — Marlo Morgan

Anyway, you don't know what's going to happen. I'm only just thickening the plot.
I'd say it was pretty thick already.
Thick plots are my specialty. If you want a thinner kind, look elsewhere. — Margaret Atwood

People have no idea of the things that don't happen to them - the lives they're not living, the deaths stalking them - and thank Christ for that. Hard enough to get through each day without glimpsing all the hovering possibilities, like insects thickening the air. — Emma Donoghue

the sweet drone of honeysuckle thickening the — Emma Cline

Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows. — George Eliot

The silence behind her was closing and thickening, and becoming coloured, like water into which a brilliant dye is being poured — Joan Aiken

And I saw it didn't matter
who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.
The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty
of the Iranian attendant, the thickening
clouds
nothing was mine. And I understood
finally, after a semester of philosophy,
a thousand books of poetry, after death
and childbirth and the startled cries of men
who called out my name as they entered me,
I finally believed I was alone, felt it
in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo
like a thin bell. — Dorianne Laux

But the cracks were splitting, finding power, thickening into chasms. — Anthony Doerr

Conspiracy! Intrigue! A rapidly thickening plot! Add some bestiality and a lecherous priest and I'd say you have the beginnings of a beautiful novel. — Marquis De Sade

But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer. — Edith Wharton

In a state of mental tumult, conflict and disorientation, he wanders the freezing city night, now gazing at the ice thickening on the dark waters of the Neva, now peering at the great horseman on his plinth with a vague terror, as though the horseman were not the effigy of the city's founder but the herald of four yet more mythic horsemen who are, indeed, on their way to confound Petersburg forever, though they won't arrive yet, not quite yet. — Angela Carter

We sink too easily into stupid and overfed sensuality, our bodies thickening even more quickly than our minds. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

I know women. And when they clam up like this? They're not just working one thought over in their brains. Nope, they're constructing a complicated web of scenarios and what ifs, each thread layering over another, thickening and twisting until suddenly they're mad about something that never even occurred to you. — Elle Kennedy

I was just past forty, that age when you wake up in the morning and feel something thickening inside and only people too old to matter refer to you as a young man anymore. (The Last Days of Il Duce) — Dominic Stansberry

A shadow fills the space where he stood, familiar and utterly changed at the same time. "E-Elias?" "I'm here." He hauls me to my feet. He is lean as a rail, and his eyes appear to almost glow in the thickening smoke. "Your brother is here. Tas is here. We're alive. We're all right. And that was beautifully done." He nods to the soldier, who has ripped the dagger out of his thigh and is now crawling away. "He'll be limping for months." I — Sabaa Tahir

Your arousal is like the sweetest perfume I've ever smelled ... I can sense it all around me - tingling against my skin, thickening your blood and shoving me off the edge of insanity. — Kenya Wright

...they lived in a curious but not unhappy isolation, though her father was a popular schoolteacher. Partly they were cut off by Sara's heart trouble, but also by their subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network, which nobody around them listened to. By Sara's making her own clothes - sometimes ineptly - from Vogue patterns, instead of Butterick. Even by the way they preserved some impression of youth instead of thickening and slouching like the parents of Juliet's schoolfellows. — Alice Munro

You're treating God only as a means to Michael. But the whole thickening treatment consists in learning to want God for His own sake ... You mean, if I I were only a mother. But there is no such thing as being only a mother. You exist as Michael's mother only because you first exist as God's creature. That relation is older and closer. No, listen, Pam! He also loves. He also has suffered. He also has waited a long time! — C.S. Lewis

In having a purpose. I could feel it hardening up my bones and thickening my blood. I felt older and smarter than anyone else I knew. I could do anything, anything at all. — Carol Rifka Brunt