To Be Stripped Quotes & Sayings

There is a greater strength than wealth, and it is greater because it cannot be taken away. Our strength, the strength of the proletariat, is in our muscles, in our hands to cast ballots, in our fingers to pull triggers. This strength we cannot be stripped of. It is the primitive strength, it is the strength that is to life germane, it is the strength that is stronger than wealth, and that wealth cannot take away. "But your strength is detachable. It can be taken away from you. Even now the Plutocracy is taking it away from you. In the end it will take it all away from you. And then you will cease to be the middle class. You will descend to us. You will become proletarians. And the beauty of it is that you will then add to our strength. We will hail you brothers, and we will fight shoulder to shoulder in the cause of humanity. "You — Jack London

Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes
with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating. — Michael Crichton

Debate is never finished; it can't be, lest democracy be no longer democratic and society be stripped of or forfeit its autonomy. Democracy means that the citizen's task is never complete. Democracy exists through persevering and unyielding citizens' concern. Once that concern is put to sleep, democracy expires.
And so there is no, and cannot be, a democracy, an autonomous society, without autonomous citizens - that is, citizens endowed with individual liberty and individual responsibility for the ways they use it. That liberty is another value - though unthinkable in separation from the value of democracy. Democracy rests on the freedom of its citizens, and citizens rest their confidence of being free and the courage to be free on the democracy of their polis. The two make each other and are made in the process of that making. — Zygmunt Bauman

The most important thing for me personally is that I can connect with other people through my music. I want my album to be like a trip that people can take with me. My music is like me stripped naked because I open myself up completely. — Chloe Rose Lattanzi

Nyx had killed a lot of people. She'd let even more die through neglect. Rhys was just one more. I'm the same person, aren't I? she thought. She had burned herself up, only to come out the other side exactly the same.

Taite's signal would get out, Nyx knew. It would be soon enough to save *her*.

But it would not be soon enough for Rhys.

Nyx hardened her jaw. Her hands and feet were still tied. They'd stripped her of her most obvious weapons. She could just wait this out.

She saw Rhys register that. But there was no shock. Just resignation. He knew her for what she was.

Butcher. Monster.

The same old monster. — Kameron Hurley

In actual fact, however, the revolt of Ibsen and Shaw against the conventional nineteenth century drama could very well be described as a return to Shakespeare, as an attempt once again to present human beings in their historical and social setting and not, as playwrights since the Restoration had done, either as wholly private or as embodiments of the social manners of a tiny class. Shakespeare's plays, it is true, are not, in the Shavian sense, "dramas of thought," that is to say, not one of his characters is an intellectual: it is true, as Shaw says, that, when stripped of their wonderful diction, the philosophical and moral views expressed by his characters are commonplaces, but the number of people in any generation or society whose thoughts are not commonplace is very small indeed. On the other hand, there is hardly one of his plays which does not provide unending food for thought, if one cares to think about it. — W. H. Auden

She turned back to Jace. "Do you have to be so-," she began, but stopped when she saw his face. It looked stripped down, oddly vulnerable.
"Unpleasant?" he finishes for her. "Only at days when my adoptive mother tosses me out of the house with instructions never to darken her door again. Usually I'm remarkably good-natured. Try me on any day that doesn't end in y. — Cassandra Clare

Trying to find the proper care in a civilization where only a small part of the population will ever understand what you are going through is a burden many first responders are saddled with. PTSI, injuries, and politics weigh heavily on the officer, yet we continue to turn a blind eye to them. We have made officers into robotic super heroes that aren't allowed feelings, intellect, or human error. They have been ostracized by society and stripped of their basic human behaviors.

We also have yet to admit there are husbands, wives, children, and parents actively involved in these officers' lives hoping to help them cope with their trauma. Families who do more than make sure they get enough sleep, a hot meal and fresh uniforms in the closet. The faces of the families are yet to be seen. — Karen Rodwill Solomon

To live with yourself you had to cut off the hand that offended, cut, slice, peel, scrape, and tear away at yourself till all you were left with were your stripped-down bones. Your bones gave you away; you could not hide your bones, nor could you avoid staring at them. All you wanted was for others to be stripped down like you ... — Andre Aciman

I was terrified of what might have happened to you," I choked out.
"I was terrified thinking the same about you."
"The devilcraft-" I began.
Patch exhaled beneath me, and my body dipped with his. His breath carried relief and raw emotion. His eyes, stripped of everything but sincerity, found mine. "My skin can be replaced. But you can't, Angel. When Dante left, I thought it was over. I thought I'd failed you. I've never prayed so hard in my life. — Becca Fitzpatrick

This was what is was to be alone. No wonder solitary confinement was considered such a severe punishment. Being locked away from everyone you loved was infinitely cruel. Still, solitary would only work perfectly if you first stripped the prisoner of his hopes and dreams. There must be no future on which to focus. — Sara Steger

If eternity touched you, if all the trappings of time and self were stripped away and you were all soul, if God "happened" to you - then isn't it possible that the experience could not be translated — Christian Wiman

I had stripped naked in front of men. Drunk. In morning's somber brightness I tried to remember why I had done it. Total exposure had seemed like the only way to be seen more clearly, heard, but now it seemed the opposite: a wild act that would define me. — Aspen Matis

Everything I thought I knew about what it meant to be a man was stripped away. What remained was what it meant to be a man who loved a woman as much as I did. To be a human being experiencing this life in all its ugliness, its beauty, its pain and hate; good and evil; love and death. — Emma Scott

Buffett's uncommon urge to chronicle made him a unique character in American life, not only a great capitalist but the Great Explainer of American capitalism. He taught a generation how to think about business, and he showed that securities were not just tokens like the Monopoly flatiron, and that investing need not be a game of chance. It was also a logical, commonsensical enterprise, like the tangible businesses beneath. He stripped Wall Street of its mystery and rejoined it to Main Street
a mythical or disappearing place, perhaps, but one that is comprehensible to the ordinary American. — Roger Lowenstein

It's all right that there are things that you do not get over, not really. You just go on, knowing that the things you love could be stripped from you at any moment, remembering to love them now.
It makes you human. You try to be decent and treat people gently, knowing that they, too, have their scars and madness that, like yours, do not show. — Joy Castro

I felt a strange sense of calm and realized what I was feeling was the release of responsibility. Nobody expected me to be at work the next day. Nobody was trying to call me. I had no e-mail to check. Ghost enthusiasts weren't stalking me on Facebook. Our responsibilities were stripped down to the bare biological basics: thirst, hunger, cold. All at once I could see why lifelong convicts got to where they couldn't function outside of prison walls. You're almost functioning more at a level for which the human brain was intended. — David Wong

When the lord says you must 'become as one of these little ones,' I take Him to mean you must be stripped of all the accretions of smugness and pretence and triviality. — Marilynne Robinson

Perhaps nuns felt like this, she thought, when they passed within convent walls and left the glitter of the world behind. But their renunciation was of the will, while circumstances beyond her control had stripped her of the people who meant everything to her. And yet was it not possible that they had endured the same impoverishment, so that when the glory that was life had become husks they found it good to exchange those dead things for service and whatever vicarious happiness could be salvaged? Maybe selflessness was only selfishness on another level. — Margaret Landon

Any candidate who suggests that too many people are going to jail for too long will be targeted in an opponent's television ads as "soft on crime" and booted out of office. The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men. A — Steven Pinker

Because I have nothing else to live for. You told me of your brother's betrayal. Imagine your own father calling out his hounds to kill your infant daughter and husband. Imagine what it was like to watch them die and then be taken and punished for something you didn't do. To be stripped of your dignity and emotions because your father was embarrassed by a stupid, insignificant dream he'd had and he blamed everyone who walks in the dreams for it. You feel your pain, Aiden. I feel mine. (Leta) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

'The 5th Wave' is sci-fi, but I tried very hard to ground the story in very human terms and in those universal themes that transcend genre. How do we define ourselves? What, exactly, does it mean to be human? What remains after everything we trust, everything we believe in and rely upon, has been stripped away? — Rick Yancey

I was deprived of the ability to feel so I wouldn't be able to feel how dreadfully vile is that vileness, so I wouldn't retreat from it, wouldn't run horror-stricken from it. Yes, I was stripped of feelings, But not utterly. Whoever did it made a botch of it, Yen. — Andrzej Sapkowski

I used to be a happy person. A person with a sparkle in her eye. I was carefree, easygoing, fun, and knew joy on a regular basis. I'm smart. I have a college degree from a good school. I've built a career from my degree and I'm good at it. I had friends. Lots of good friends. I used to go out. I was passionate about life and love and myself. None of that person exists anymore. She's been stripped of all redeeming qualities. — K. Larsen

Its subtlest, most appealing accomplishment may be in how other characters respond to Gregorius' precipitous swerve onto the spiritual path. ( ... ) That said, Night Train to Lisbon is a very long, ambitious book that's feverishly overwritten. ( ... ) Think of W.G. Sebald recast for the mass market: stripped of nuance, cooked at high temperature and pounded home, clause after clause. Some of the clumsiness derives from Barbara Harshav's inelegant translation
we're often aware of her struggle
but she can't be blamed for the pervasive bloat. — Michelle Huneven

I'm not afraid to have no make-up on and no hair. I just want to be stripped back. — Jessie J.

McCartney's first involvement is to be stripped by Saha — Guy Mowbray

Over the summer we chatted one night while Angie stripped a bed, changed wet sheets, comforted and repajamaed a toddler, and chased down a car of speeding teenagers while shaking a brick at them, never once interrupting the conversation or setting down her margarita. The only reason this woman isn't president of General Motors is because she's chosen not to be. — Jen Lancaster

The desire for my "rights" in order to preserve my individuality (rather than allowing God the full right to take over my life and to perfect my personality) has to be stripped away. I have to learn to persevere in the race He has set before me, drawing strength only from Him, and not relying at all on what I may consider any natural abilities I may have. I have to let God take from me even that strength which I thought I had in order that He may more fully reveal His own strength: in order that He may continue in me the work of conforming me to the image of His Son. — Helen Roseveare

That's the thing about true love. It can rise from the ashes because at its source, it's indestructible. Layers can be stripped away and lost, but if you're lucky enough to find them again and put them back together, the end result is stronger than ever. — Penelope Ward

Rimbaud held the keys to a mystical language that I devoured even as I could not fully decipher it. My unrequited love for him was as real to me as anything I had experienced. At the factory where I had labored with a hard-edged, illiterate group of women, I was harassed in his name. Suspecting me of being a Communist for reading a book in a foreign language, they threatened me in the john, prodding me to denounce him. It was within this atmosphere that I seethed. It was for him that I wrote and dreamed. He became my archangel, delivering me from the mundane horrors of factory life. His hands had chiseled a manual of heaven and I held them fast. The knowledge of him added swagger to my step and this could not be stripped away. I tossed my copy of Illuminations in a plaid suitcase. We would escape together. — Patti Smith

Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to
Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.
Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin' ship
My senses have been stripped, my hands can't feel to grip
My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels
To be wanderin'
I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it. — Bob Dylan

Can you make it past me, thief-catcher?" Mat called, careful not to take his eyes off the man waiting for him with blade poised to strike. Sandar had insisted irritably on "thief-catcher," not "thief-taker," though Mat could not see any difference.
"I cannot," Sandar called from behind him. "If you move to let me by, you will lose room to swing that oar you call a staff, and he will spit you like a grunt."
Like a what? "Well, think of something, Tairen. This ragamuffin is grating my nerves."
The man in the gold-striped coat sneered. "You will be honored to die on the blade of the High Lord Darlin, peasant, if I allow it so." It was the first time he had deigned to speak. "Instead, I think I will have the pair of you hung by the heels, and watch while the skin is stripped from your bodies - "
"I do not think I'd like that," Mat said. — Robert Jordan

The reason Buddhism can be so naturalised is because, stripped of its supernatural elements, its core teachings can be giving a sound, secular philosophical interpretation. In other words, it becomes a religion acceptable to the contemporary, naturalistic mind only when it ceases to be a religion. — Julian Baggini

I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean. — Toni Morrison

He who had known the ceaseless worship of angels came to be a slave to men. Preaching, teaching, healing the sick, and raising the dead were parts of his ministry, of course, and the parts we might consider ourselves willing to do for God if that is what He asked. He could be seen to be God in those. But Jesus also walked miles in dusty heat. He healed, and people forgot to thank Him. He was pressed and harried by mobs of exigent people, got tired and hungry, was "tailed" and watched and pounced upon by suspicious, jealous, self-righteous religious leaders, and in the end was flogged and spat on and stripped and had nails hammered through His hands.
He relinquished the right (or the honour) of being publicly treated as equal with God. — Elisabeth Elliot

Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren't looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

In seasons of hiddenness our sense of value is disrupted, stripped of what "others" affirmed us to be. In this season God intends to give us an unshakable identity in Him, that no amount of adoration nor rejection can alter. — Alicia Britt Chole

I believed it was necessary to investigate photography, dismantle it, jettison all the non-essential components, and begin again with a stripped down but more powerful idea of what is, or could be photographic. — Lewis Baltz

The first right an immigrant is stripped of is the right to be political. — Tania Bruguera

Grey, just breathe. I love you. Unless you can tell me, without lying, that you dont love me back, then everything's going to be okay ... — Jasinda Wilder

I am better, like the tree that's been stripped of its limbs by fire begins new growth after a period of time. Still rooted in the same dirt, in the same location, with its new growth appears to be the same tree; but it's not. It has lived through a devastating blow that has forever changed its core. — Georgia A. Cockerham

A city finds its life through the humans who inhabit it. When they go, what is truly left? Just silent stones, witnesses to the history but mute in its telling, remaining thus while slowly turning to rubble. It saddens me that life's moments are thus lost, that one cannot experience the past in the same rich vibrancy as the present. You live the moments and then relegate them to memory, now just two-dimensional shadows, pictures without depth, stripped of their purest emotion, their tactile connections no longer accessible. You try to recall, but can bring back only a fraction of the event lived. The rest is gone, never to be as full and complete as it was in that one place at that one time. That was what I thought as I studied these stone remains; that all the tangible things experienced here abide somewhere in time, but can never again be wholly re-animated, now just ghosts imbedded in the crumbling walls and in the fading memories of those who once lived here. — Michael Puttonen

Don't." She looks directly into my eyes. After a month of being forced to avoid her, I feel stripped bare by her gaze. "You can be as much of a charming bastard as you want, but you're never going to bullshit your way into my heart again. — Holly Black

The proximity of an army causes prices to go up; and high prices cause people's substance to be drained away. When their substance is drained away, they will be afflicted by heavy exactions. With this loss of substance and exhaustion of strength, the homes of the people will be stripped bare, and their incomes dissipated. — Sun Tzu

Years go by Will I still be waiting For somebody else to understand Years go by If I'm stripped of my beauty And the orange clouds Raining in head Years go by Will I choke on my tears Till finally there is nothing left One more casualty You know we're too easy Easy Easy — Tori Amos

Oh, if it were lawful for men, in order to raise their opinions on horseback, to use the Scripture as stirrups, to lengthen and shorten them, each one to his own size, where, I beg you, should we be? Do you not perceive the stratagem? All authority is taken away from tradition, the Church, the Councils, the pastors: what further remains? The Scripture. The enemy is crafty. If he would tear it all away at once he would cause an alarm; he takes away a great part of it in the very beginning, then first one piece, then the other, at last he will have you stripped entirely, without Scripture and without Word of God. — Francis De Sales

I would totally support a pond scene like the one in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, but only if you were stripped first."
He slid her a glance out of the corner of his eye. She was giving him a lascivious grin that made him feel like singing at the top of his lungs. "You have a smutty mind, Alice. It's one of the many things I admire in you. Unfortunately, we are in a holy place, and although I don't particularly hold strong religious feelings, I feel it would be insulting to the caretakers of this cathedral to give in to your lustful desires and engage in sex right her and now." He thought for a moment. "Although I have to admit it is a tempting thought ... — Katie MacAlister

That this liberty [of the press] is often carried to excess; that it has sometimes degenerated into licentiousness, is seen and lamented, but the remedy has not yet been discovered. Perhaps it is an evil inseparable from the good with which it is allied; perhaps it is a shoot which cannot be stripped from the stalk without wounding vitally the plant from which it is torn. However desirable those measures might be which might correct without enslaving the press, they have never yet been devised in America. — James Madison

Pseudo faith always arranges a way out to serve in case God fails it. Real faith knows only one way and gladly allows itself to be stripped of any second way or makeshift substitutes. For true faith, it is either God or total collapse. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

To be closed from everything, and yet to feel, to think ... This is the truth of hell, stripped of its gaudy medievalisms. This loss of contact. — Joanne Harris

Chanu went on."This artist, Abedin- he painted the famine which came to our country in 1942 and '43. These famous paintings hang now in a museum in Dhaka. I will take you to see them. In the famine, there was life and there was death. The people of Bangladesh died and the crows and the vultures lived. Abedin shows it all: the child who is too weak to walk or even to crawl, and the fat, black crows- how patiently they wait by the child for their next feast.
" This is how it was. Three million people died because of starvation. Can you imagine that? You cannot. Can you imagine something else? While the crows and vultures stripped our bones, the British, our rulers, exported grain from the country. This is something you cannot imagine, but now that you know it, you will never forget."
Chanu breathed deeply but his face remained still. "That's it," he said. "It will be time to go very soon. — Rohinton Mistry

The person staring back at me was a stranger. Someone who had taken the girl I was two years ago and stripped her down only to rebuild a different person. Now I was strong, I was capable and smart. They were the good qualities. But I was also calculated, manipulative and selfish. These were the things I promised myself I wouldn't be. After I found him. After we put this right. — Jessica Shirvington

I've stripped my life down," he told me. "I don't need much. I have all the company I want to keep right in here." He shot himself in the head with his fingers. "People don't understand about the need to live simply. They make appointments all day. They even schedule their own deaths. The first time they'll have freedom to really be themselves is when they no longer exist. But up here, there's nothing but me and the sky. A million billion stars. — Holly Black

I sat at a table in my shadowy kitchen, staring down a bottle of Boone's Farm
Hard Lemonade, when a magic fluctuation hit. My wards shivered and died, leaving my home stripped of its defenses. The TV flared into life, unnaturally loud in the empty house.
I raised my eyebrow at the bottle and bet it that another urgent bulletin was on.
The bottle lost.
"Urgent bulletin!" Margaret Chang announced. "The Attorney General advises all citizens that any attempt at summoning or other activities resulting in the appearance of a supernaturally powerful being can be hazardous to yourself and to other citizens."
"No shit," I told the bottle. — Ilona Andrews

Which didn't explain why Brant remained outside with Elizabeth, even when he started to suffer from heatstroke. Or maybe heatstroke was only the excuse he used for what happened next. With one eye pinned on Elizabeth, he stripped off his shirt, something he rarely did, and proceeded to perform feats of strength. He moved large rocks for no good reason, grunting as if he were leg-pressing a good five hundred pounds. He welded hedge clippers like Edward Scissorhands. And hoed like a lumberjack bent on clearing the Sierras.

It was heatstroke. It had to be. There was no other way to explain a thirty-eight-year-old man flexing and posing for a woman like some goddamned body builder in a competition.

And the worst part about it was she didn't even pay him the slightest bit of attention. — Katie Lane

They know they dare not have their stuff stripped down to plain words. These Bishops and parsons with their beloved Christianity are like a man who has poisoned his wife and says her body's too sacred for a post-mortem. Nowadays, by the light we have, any ecclesiastic must be born blind or an intellectual rascal. Don't tell me. The world's had this apostolic succession of oily old humbugs from early Egypt onwards, trying to come it over people. Antiquity's no excuse. A sham is no better for being six thousand years stale. Christianity's no more use to us now than
the Pyramids. — H.G.Wells

Listen to me: everything you think you know, every relationship you've ever taken for granted, every plan or possibility you've ever hatched, every conceit or endeavor you've ever concocted, can be stripped from you in an instant. Sooner or later, it will happen. So prepare yourself. Be ready not to be ready. Be ready to be brought to your knees and beaten to dust. Because no stable foundation, no act of will, no force of cautious habit will save you from this fact: nothing is indestructible. — Jonathan Evison

Upon discovering what Fred had done, his mother grabbed him and stripped his clothes off. She stuck his butt out the window and yelled at the top of her voice, "Everyone in the neighborhood come quickly and see Freddie's bare ass!" That would be the first of many times during Fred Levin's life that he would bare his backside for the world to see. — Josh Young

The Machinery are a bunch of fuckwits who believe that the human body is best conceptualised as a machine, and that if behaviour is stripped down to only what is functional, a higher form of humanity will emerge. This means actions that lead to the fulfilment of their basic needs only. Disease is a malfunction. You can see where this goes. They're boring as hell, they only speak to convey information and they are more inflexible than actual machines. They are said to be good spouses and accountants. The one beside me has a distinct self-image, fully identified as a machine. He repeats to himself mentally, 'You are a machine, you are a machine. — Tade Thompson

There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself. The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the sepoys, clad, fed and petted, fatted and pampered by them. — Karl Marx

Indeed, an astoundingly small proportion of arguments 'for free speech' and 'against censorship' or 'banning' are, in fact, about free speech, censorship or banning. It is depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say. Being asked to apologise for saying something unconscionable is not the same as being stripped of the legal right to say it. It's really not very f-cking complicated. Cry "free speech" in such contexts, you are demanding the right to speak any bilge you wish without apology or fear of comeback. You are demanding not legal rights but an end to debate about and criticism of what you say. When did bigotry get so needy? This assertive & idiotic failure to understand that juridical permissibility backed up by the state is not the horizon of politics or morality is absurdly resilient. — China Mieville

However hard some things are to understand, it is never helpful to start picking and choosing biblical truths we find congenial, as if the Bible is an open-shelved supermarket where we are at perfect liberty to choose only the chocolate bars. For the Christian, it is God's Word, and it is not negotiable. What answers we find may not be exhaustive, but they give us the God who is there, and who gives us some measure of comfort and assurance. The alternative is a god we manufacture, and who provides no comfort at all. Whatever comfort we feel is self-delusion, and it will be stripped away at the end when we give an account to the God who has spoken to us, not only in Scripture, but supremely in his Son Jesus Christ. — D. A. Carson

As stripped of our ancestral knowledge as we Settlers seem to be, we defy the position of patriarchal dominance and undermine the notion of cultural superiority when we reclaim the roots of our authentic indigenity. It is our birthright as human beings to declare our true status as People of the Earth (as it is for all cultural groups), and if we collectively reject the delusional separation from nature that Empire has forced upon us, we move back into right relationship with Earth Community. Anchoring ourselves deeply into our earth-honoring culture and reclaiming our EIK (European Indigenous Knowledge) is a powerful blow against the monolith of cultural imperialism. (Page 43, Chapter 6, "We All Have IK") — Pegi Eyers

I always have wanted to know how the whole thing was done, what the process involved. And I don't particularly enjoy that my music is stripped of ancillary details, and it just sort of comes out of this big tap called the Internet like water. I like some of my water to be neatly presented in a bottle.With a label on it. — Brian Eno

I want there to be nothing in me that isn't light and pure and good. But of course that's not real. That's what happens when you're a statue in a city square, stripped of any human adornment that can't be cast in bronze. — Elan Mastai

And it is in this darkness, when there is nothing left in us that can please or comfort our own minds, when we seem to be useless and worthy of all contempt, when we seem to have failed, when we seem to be destroyed and devoured, it is then that the deep and secret selfishness that is too close to us for us to identify is stripped away from our souls. It is in this darkness that we find liberty. It is in this abandonment that we are made strong. This is the night which empties us and makes us pure. — Thomas Merton

The time had finally come when she would have to accept the full power of the Starwife. No longer could she be just Ysabelle. Now she had a land to govern and all the daunting responsibilities that that entailed. The liberty she had experienced since the night she had escaped from the Ring of Banbha seemed to vanish. She was left stripped of her freedom, and only long years of a lonely reign stretched out before her. — Robin Jarvis

Just think of what it's going to be like, the entire worlds run by three Executive Officer's, deciding who gets to settle where- when every settled place is slaved to meeting Earth's agenda. I've seen it already, Captain, so have you. You have been to the colonies and seen how they do everything to meet their contractual obligations. It's like every vestige of civil rights has been stripped away. — Matthew S. Williams

When spirits fall, their darkness is revealed, for they are stripped of the garment of your light. By the misery and restlessness which they then suffer you make clear to us how noble a being is your rational creation, for nothing less than yourself suffices to give it rest and happiness. This means that it cannot find them in itself. For you, O God, will shine on the darkness about us. From you proceeds our garment of light, and our dusk shall be noonday. — Augustine Of Hippo

If we constantly apply ourselves to meditation practice during the course of our lives, we may be able, though with some difficulty, to strip away all the supports that maintain the illusion of the ego-self. However, the material fabric of the ego's support-bot the world and the physical body-is destroyed by death and all contact with its "friends" is severed. Now the mind is truly left to its own devices and its experience of reality is much more direct and immediate. The worldly concerns which formerly served as the support of the ego have all been stripped away and the insubstantial nature of its condition has been exposed in all its falsity. It was never really real at all, and the awesome power of this truth may strike the consciousness like a bombshell! — Stephen Hodge

He was more tired than he had a right to be, considering he'd done little more than tool along in the gig, stroll around the property, and talk with Anna. But he was exhausted, and he'd taken some sort of chill in the rain, and he could barely keep his eyes open. Still, he wasn't going to waste an opportunity to torment his intended duchess, so he stripped out of his shirt, his breeches, stockings, and smalls, and took the bucket to the hearth, the better to illuminate him for Anna's peeping eyes. Truth — Grace Burrowes

Sloughing my skin / escaping it's grip / stripped of my wit / it hurts to be me . — Maggie Stiefvater

I am as vulnerable and fragile as it is possible to be. I am shredded to the core. I am at the point where I am stripped bare. — Rachel Hunter

You know how much you can hurt a girl's ego by turning her down when she's stripped in front of you?" I put my hand to my chest. "I'll probably be in counseling for months to repair the damage."
"Somehow I think you can handle it."
"Games," I mutter. "Emotionally speaking, I'm going to be the man in this relationship, aren't I?"
"You certainly aren't like any woman I've ever met before. — Lexi Ryan

We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us - our genes, our bones, our wombs - that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free. — Lauren DeStefano

Totalitarian states use propaganda to orchestrate historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. The object is to make sure the populace does not remember what it means to be free. And once a population does not remember what it means to be free, it does not react when freedom is stripped from it. — Chris Hedges

To address this, we must wage a war on the militants. First, we must make it an offence, punishable by many years in jail, to ride a bicycle in anything other than what I like to call home clothes. Cycling shops selling gel for your bottom crack and outfits with padded gussets will be raided by the police and the owners prosecuted. This way, cyclists will be stripped of their uniforms and made to look like human beings. — Jeremy Clarkson

But if they stripped all those labels off, people might be shocked to find a normal girl beneath. Who doesn't want to spend her days on the defensive. Who wants what everyone else wants. To be loved. — Kim Harrington

Crowds exhibit a docile respect for force, And are but slightly impressed by kindness, Which for them is scarcely other than a form of weakness. Their sympathies have never been bestowed upon easy going masters, but the tyrants who vigorously oppressed them. It is to these latter that they always erect the loftiest statues. It is true that they willingly trample on the despot whom they have stripped of his power, but it is because having lost his power he resumes his place among the feeble who are to be despised because they are not to be feared. The type of hero dear to a crowd will always have the semblance of a Caesar, His insignia attract them, His authority overawes them, and his sword instils them with fear. — Gustave Le Bon

And a naked woman was waiting for him on it. Oh, crap. He'd forgotten all about Ellen, but Marcus's winery manager obviously hadn't forgotten about him. If things had gone differently tonight - way differently - he knew he would have been psyched to find her already stripped down and ready for him. Only, after meeting Chloe, Chase was about as unpsyched by Ellen's naked presence in the house as he could be. Ellen's eyes were wide as she looked between him and Chloe. Clearly, surprise had her frozen in place on the bed as it took her a minute to remove her iPod headphones. Obviously, the music had masked the sound of Chase and Chloe's conversation in the living room, and Ellen had had no idea that Chase wouldn't be walking through the bedroom door alone. — Bella Andre

I thought of my father, alone and elsewhere, his head cradled in his hands. I thought of the day he'd punched a hole straight through the kitchen wall, thinking she'd be tucked away inside. All those places he'd looked and never found. Inside their mattress. In stained-glass windows. How he'd scoured the carpet for her stray hair and strung them all together with a ribbon; how he'd slept with that one lock swathed across his nostrils, hugging a pillow fitted with a nightshirt. How he'd dug up the backyard, stripped and sweating. How he'd played her favorite album on repeat and loud, a lure. How when we took up the carpet in my bedroom to find her, under the carpet was wood. Under the wood there was cracked concrete. Under the concrete there was dirt. Under the dirt there was a cavity of water. I swam down into the water with my nose clenched and lungs burning in my chest but I could not find the bottom and I couldn't see a thing. — Blake Butler

'Nip/Tuck' did make me very comfortable in my own skin, no pun intended. I had to be stripped down a lot, and you're kind of in front of the whole world, and it teaches you to accept yourself and be comfortable with yourself real quickly. — Kelly Carlson

You're blessed when you are out of options and all you can do is lean on God. Because when you realize your need for God, it is only then that you tap into His immeasurable greatness and goodness. You're blessed when you've been stripped of that which is most precious to you. Only then can you be tenderly embraced by the One most precious to you. — Eric Ludy

How can there be love without a true choice? Would you suggest that man be stripped of the capacity to love? — Ted Dekker

Sergeant Bellow marched us to the quartermaster's. It was there we were stripped of all vestiges of personality. It is the quartermasters who make soldiers, sailors and marines. In their presence, one strips down. With each divestment, a trait is lost; the discard of a garment marks the quiet death of an idiosyncrasy. I take off my socks; gone is a propensity for stripes, or clocks, or checks, or even solids; ended is a tendency to combine purple socks with brown tie. My socks henceforth will be tan. They will neither be soiled, nor rolled, nor gaudy, nor restrained, nor holey. They will be tan. The only other thing they may be is clean. — Robert Leckie

Your death and my death are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss us much either. — Alexander Smith

The struggle is really hard sometimes. And then I meet you. And I feel stuff that I've never felt before. Things that I never thought I would be lucky enough to experience. And I feel so out of control in the way I am with you. Like I'm stripped bare and for once someone sees everything inside of me ... the good and the really really ugly. — A Meredith Walters

Stripped of its arrogance, its desire to make off with half of the patrimony and never be seen again, history belongs at the family table. If theology, the older brother, pretends not to need or notice him it will be a sign that he has forgotten, after all, who his father is. — N. T. Wright

The Seanchan in the room seemed stunned that Mat had suddenly stripped to the waist. He did not see why, They had servants that wore much less. Light, but they did.
"I'm tempted to do the same as you," Min muttered, grabbing the front of her dress.
Mat Froze, then sputtered. He must have swallowed a fly or something. "Burn me," he said, throwing on the shirt he dug out of the bundle. "I'll give you a hundred Tar Valon marks if you do it, just so I can tell the story."
That earned him a glare, through he did not know why. She was the one talking about striding about like a bloody Aiel Maiden on her way to the sweat tent.
Min did not do it, and he was almost sad. Almost. He had to be careful around Min. He was certain that a smile in the wrong place would earn him a knifing not only from her, but from Tuon, and Mat was much happier with only one knife stuck on him at a time. — Robert Jordan

The time has come when we cannot be so careless. Unless we do better, we may suffer through a stark emergency of the environment. We may create a hostile world: a world to bruise ourselves against; a world of sprawling cities, unplanned or badly planned; a world whose water is full of sludge, whose winds are full of soot; a world whose landscape has been totally neglected, stripped, marred, and wasted. All of this need not happen if we choose well, and particularly if we plan well and if we act well. — Lyndon B. Johnson

To be completely stripped bare of any image power or my hair. To step onstage and get the response that I got blew any problems I had about self-image out the door. — Melissa Etheridge

One of the things I wanted to do with 'The Turn' was write a production of songs that could be stripped down to one or two instruments if you chose to do it. — Alison Moyet

This is American two-one-three to the cockpit voice recorder. Now we know what it's like. It is worse than we'd ever imagined. They didn't prepare us for this at the death simulator in Denver. Our fear is pure, so totally stripped of distractions and pressures as to be a form of transcendental meditation. In less than three minutes we will touch down, so to speak. They will find our bodies in some smoking field, strewn about in the grisly attitudes of death. I love you, Lance." This time there was a brief pause before the mass wailing recommenced. Lance? — Don DeLillo

All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes-but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging.. — Salman Rushdie

To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else but to contemplate morality stripped of all admixture of sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love. How much she then eclipses everything else that appears charming to the affections, every one may readily perceive with the least exertion of his reason, if it be not wholly spoiled for abstraction. — Immanuel Kant

Not according to this," Jazz said, taking the report. "No evidence of sexual activity or anything like it."
"Well, there's that," Howie said, sounding relieved. Jazz wondered at that - was it really so much better to be unmolested, but still murdered in a horrible fashion? To die in pain and terror, stripped, left in a field, your fingers cut off? But as long as you weren't raped, well, that was alright, then? Did it really matter at that point? — Barry Lyga

I didn't cry out and I didn't weep when I was told that my son Henri was a prisoner in his own world, when it was confirmed that he is one of those children who don't hear us, don't speak to us, even though they're neither deaf nor mute. He is also one of those children we must love from a distance, neither touching, nor kissing, not smiling at them because every one of their senses would be assaulted by the odour of our skin, by the intensity of our voices, the texture of our hair, the throbbing of our hearts. Probably he'll never call me maman lovingly, even if he can pronounce the world poire with all the roundness and sensuality of the oi sound. He will never understand why I cried when he smiled for the first time. He won't know that, thanks to him, every spark of joy has become a blessing and that I will keep waging war against autism, even if I know already that it's invincible. Already, I am defeated, stripped bare, beaten down. — Kim Thuy

If the men were without passions, it would be forgivable to see Machiavel try to give some to them; he would be the new [[Prometheus]] bringing celestial fire to breathe life into robots. But no man is without passions. When they are moderated, they are the heart of the enterprise; but when the brake is stripped of them, they are its destruction. — Frederick The Great

Mrs. Scatcherd raps Dutchy's knuckles several times with a long wooden ruler, though it seems to me a halfhearted penalty. He barely winces, then shakes his hands twice in the air and winks at me. Truly , there isn't much more she can do. Stripped of family and identity, fed meager rations, consigned to hard wooden seats until we are to be, as Slobbery Jack suggested, sold into slavery - our mere existence is punishment enough. — Christina Baker Kline