Torn Down Quotes & Sayings

There are places in New York where the city's anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets
these express with particular force the city's penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure. — Janet Malcolm

She wanted to tell him that she understood him now, in a way she'd never understood anyone before. Because she was with him. It wasn't even like being in the web; it was much closer than that, much deeper. He'd torn down all the barriers and put his soul into her hands. — L.J.Smith

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. — Robert M. Pirsig

Everything has a past, a voice, existed at some point, even things as small and seemingly meaningless as a house in a huge suburb. It's a house like every other house ... but at some point a family lived there, made it theirs, made it important. When people forget that history, that somebody at some point thought the house mattered, it just becomes an empty pile of nailed wood and brick and concrete that gets torn down for some strip mall or chain store to take its place ... and that's what happens more and more now, everything is disposable, always replaced with no thought at all. That's where things get lost, memories get lost, humanity slips through the cracks, because when we all fail to pay attention to the things that make up our lives, we're no longer human at all, not really. — Rebecca McNutt

I wanted some assurances that my life would never again be torn apart like that, that I would never again suffer the pain of watching my loved one destroyed by his own hand. And with that one telephone message I realized, in a brutal, final way that so long as I was with Flynn I would never be protected from the horror of suicide. That he would always be capable of stopping his medication, always be capable of lying to cover his illness, always be capable of swallowing forty pills and lying down beside his girlfriend to die. — Tabitha Suzuma

Many different kinds of sprouts lay torn. Green, purple and orange leaves lay scattered across the dark soil, and the thorn fence surrounding the bed had a fist-sized hole in it. Teacher eased himself into a squat, poked at the inside of the hole. Whatever made the hole had left blood on the thorns. The sprouts looked like wispy ghosts, pale and broken. Their delicate leaves and stems were riddled with bites. Life drained out of them like water dripping from a hanging cloth, and a breeze made them dance sadly. It felt like a funeral.
Teacher picked up a gnawed berry and gently squeezed it until purple juice dripped down his thumb. He placed the berry by the plant's roots.
Chandi's small face bunched up. "Are they dead?"
"They're dying, yes." Yuvali took her hand. "But their bodies will help other plants grow. — B.T. Lowry

she acknowledges Thomas only by bending down and scraping a handful of dirt into her hands, her fingernails filling with the cold moist earth and making them brown at the edges. And then she tosses it onto his coffin, where bits and pieces of torn grass and weeds have mixed with the tender soil and are sliding in a small pile down the sides of the domed casket. — Tiffani Burnett-Velez

You're ruining that book!" He pointed to the page I'd torn out. "That's a perfectly good book!" Holding his gaze, I reached down and ripped another page out. "I'm making roses." "Well, it's my book." "Sorry." I tore out another. — Kate Avery Ellison

The sun as the expression of old world energy is torn down from the heavens by modern man, who by virtue of his technological superiority creates his own energy source. — El Lissitzky

Fireheart tensed, waiting for whatever had hunted down these apprentices to emerge from the trees and attack, but nothing stirred. Feeling as if his legs hardly belonged to him, he sprang down and stumbled across to Swiftpaw.
The apprentice lay on his side, his legs splayed out. His black-and-white fur was torn, and his body was covered with dreadful wounds, ripped by teeth far bigger than any cat's. His jaws still snarled and his eyes glared. He was dead, and Fireheart could see that he had died fighting. — Erin Hunter

He was a skinny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who had the pinched, slightly unhealthy look of someone who has grown a lot in a short space of time. His jeans were torn and dirty, his T-shirt baggy and faded, and the soles of his trainers were peeling away from the uppers. Harry Potter's appearance did not endear him to the neighbours, who were the sort of people who thought scruffiness ought to be punishable by law, but as he had hidden himself behind a large hydrangea bush this evening he was quite invisible to passers-by. In fact, the only way he would be spotted was if his Uncle Vernon or Aunt Petunia stuck their heads out of the living-room window and looked straight down into the flowerbed below. On — J.K. Rowling

DOCTOR: Oh. My, God! Oh, it's bigger!
RIVER: Well, yes.
DOCTOR: On the inside,
RIVER: We need to concentrate.
DOCTOR: Than it is
RIVER: I know where you're going with this, but I need you to calm down.
DOCTOR: On the outside!
RIVER: You've certainly grasped the essentials.
DOCTOR: My entire understanding of physical space has been transformed! Three-dimensional Euclidean geometry has been torn up, thrown in the air and snogged to death! My grasp of the universal constants of physical reality has been changed forever. — The Doctor

Without a conscious thought to do so, he went down on his knees in front of her, grasping both her hands. If she wouldn't look up at him, she could
look down at him. Her tiny, surprised intake of breath caught in the air between them. He lifted her knuckles to his lips, aching so hard to touch
some part of her. Being away from you has been ... hell. I could wax poetic and tell you it's been like being torn away from my own soul, or missing a
shard of my heart, but in the end it's been absolute torment. I'm missing all those things if I'm not with you. — Cherrie Lynn

I felt that I was breaking him apart as much as I was breaking myself apart. I imagined that pain in his mercury eyes and the silent tears whispered their way down my cheeks. Silent tears are the worst kind, the kind that shows the most pain and they were all I had left. The Fates had left me cold, with half a heart and a torn apart soul. — Cassandra Giovanni, Let The Fates Decide

How the hell do I know? It just hurts me to think about it ... And its not because you're a great lay. Though you are. But I've had great lays before, and I didn't get torn up. You should have known it would come down to this. Garrett — Iris Johansen

Rock ... is the expression of elemental passions ... In the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe. — Pope Benedict XVI

Another woman, "whose face no one had ever seen outside the door of her house and who had never walked during the day in the city,"2 had torn off her headscarf, the better to reproach the king. Yusuf, in his fury, had ordered her daughter and granddaughter killed before her, their blood poured down her throat, and then her own head to be sent flying. — Tom Holland

Now he saw another elephant emerge from the place where it had stood hidden in the trees. Very slowly it walked to the mutilated body and looked down. With its sinuous trunk it struck the huge corpse; then it reached up, broke some leafy branches with a snap, and draped them over the mass of torn thick flesh. Finally it tilted its massive head, raised its trunk, and roared into the empty landscape. — Lois Lowry

It hurts so much, she thought. Our children, Ned, all our sweet babes. Rickon, Bran, Arya, Sansa, Robb ... Robb ... please, Ned, please, make it stop, make it stop hurting ... The white tears and the red ones ran together until her face was torn and tattered, the face that Ned had loved. Catelyn Stark raised her hands and watched the blood run down her long fingers, over her wrists, beneath the sleeves of her gown. Slow red worms crawled along her arms and under her clothes. It tickles. That made her laugh until she screamed. "Mad," someone said, "she's lost her wits," and someone else said, "Make an end," and a hand grabbed her scalp just as she'd done with Jinglebell, and she thought, No, don't, don't cut my hair, Ned loves my hair. Then the steel was at her throat, and its bite was red and cold. - Catelyn Stark — George R R Martin

Ringer's scrunched into a corner of the room with good angles on the windows and the door coming in from the lobby. A hand on her neck, and that hand is gloved in blood. I have to look. She doesn't want me to look. I'm like, "Don't be stupid, I have to look." So she lets me look. It's superficial, between a cut and a gouge. I find a scarf lying on a display table and she wads it up and presses it against her neck. Nods at my torn sleeve. "Are you hit?" I shake my head and ease down on the floor beside her. We're both pulling hard for air. My head swims with adrenaline. "Not to be judgmental, but as a sniper, this guy sucks. — Rick Yancey

Being idolized and being torn down felt oddly similar. They both made me feel alone.
Friendship and trust should be earned, and when you're famous, people seem to want to give them to you whether you've earned them or not, and it felt dishonest to me. Fame was not real. It was all a projection - fame made me a blank canvas that people projected their love, lust, troubles, self-worth, and desire upon.
Fame and power do not change us, they amplify us. — Jewel

In keeping with the American effort to reconcile with Japan, all of them, including those serving life sentences, would soon be paroled. It appears that even Sueharu Kitamura, "the Quack," was set free, in spite of his death sentence. By 1958, every war criminal who had not been executed would be free, and on December 30 of that year, all would be granted amnesty. Sugamo would be torn down, and the epic ordeals of POWs in Japan would fade from the world's memory. — Laura Hillenbrand

When this tent we live in - our body here on earth - is torn down, God will have a house in heaven for us to live in, a home he himself has made, which will last forever. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:1 TEV — Rick Warren

I know what it's like to be torn between a love so pure it burns you deep down in a place you didn't know someone could touch you and between your oath and duties. Between the love of a father you've always known and one you know you can depend on forever versus a love that's new and untested. But you know what I learned? It's a lot easier to live without my father's love than it is to live without Phoebe's. (Urian)
(Acheron didn't speak as Urian left him alone.)
That just makes you want to vomit, doesn't it? (Jaden) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

If I did not wear torn pants, orthopedic shoes, frantic disheveled hair, that is to say, if I did not tone down my beauty, people would go mad. Married men would run amuck. — Brenda Ueland

Modern techniques have torn down state frontiers, both economical and intellectual. The growth of means of transport has created a world market and an opportunity for division of labor embracing all the developed and most of the undeveloped states. — Christian Lous Lange

That's because those pages got torn to shreds when you left, now you both are in different chapters. He wants you - like always, and you want the hot guy down the street. Typical Frankie and Brody style. You guys dance one wild tango, if you ask me. — A.M. Willard

Mother to Son

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor -
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a'climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now -
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
- Langston Hughes (112) — Sapphire.

Was in this way that the people of antiquity, when they had raised a temple on the site of one which had been torn down, always took care to introduce into the new building some of the materials, or at least a column, of the old one, in order to preserve something of the old and sacred in the modern, and in order that the souvenir, crude and worn, should have its worship and its influence over the heart, even among the master-pieces of the new sanctuary. — Alphonse De Lamartine

[...] no slaves down here, all that abstraction torn away like skin coming off a body, and these were people -- human fucking beings, each with the one life he was given, and this was the life they had. — Ben H. Winters

There are life events that can destroy the personality, which is a lot more fragile than most people imagine, constructed as it is from bits provided by others in the most haphazard way. People can be torn down to the core, "shattered," as the expression goes, and then they seek sleep. And dreams, which provide the ground for the construction of a new and more integrated self. Providing there's a core, and providing they're willing to do the work. — Michael Gruber

We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

These sites have torn down the geographical divide that once prevented long distance social relationships from forming, allowing instant communication and connections to take place and a virtual second life to take hold for its users. — Mike Fitzpatrick

Certain forms are torn down, and it is well that they should be, but on condition that they are followed by reconstruction. — Victor Hugo

Grief is nothing but a painful waiting, a horrible patience. Grief cannot be torn down or scaled or overcome or outsmarted. It can only be outlasted. Survival is surrender to the brick wall. There — Glennon Doyle Melton

Your machinery is beautiful. Your society people have apologized to me for the envious ridicule with which your newspapers have referred to me. Your newspapers are comic but never amusing. Your Water Tower is a castellated monstrosity with pepperboxes stuck all over it. I am amazed that any people could so abuse Gothic art and make a structure not like a water tower but like a tower of a medieval castle. It should be torn down. It is a shame to spend so much money on buildings with such an unsatisfactory result. Your city looks positively dreary. — Oscar Wilde

All Gaza's temples are torn down and burned and the city is cleansed of every belief but the Christian faith. The most stubborn opponents, faute de mieux, are tied up, marched away to the provincial capital, severely tortured, and all killed mala morte, 'a great number.' — Ramsay MacMullen

At my confirmation, where you get the Holy Spirit, I came down the stairs at my party and had torn, like, 80 holes in my pantyhose and said I had the Holy Spirit, and just would do things like that all the time. — Paula Pell

Rain
Soft rain, summer rain
Whispers from bushes, whispers from trees.
Oh, how lovely and full of blessing
To dream and be satisfied.
I was so long in the outer brightness,
I am not used to this upheaval:
Being at home in my own soul,
Never to be led elsewhere.
I want nothing, I long for nothing,
I hum gently the sounds of childhood,
And I reach home astounded
In the warm beauty of dreams.
Heart, how torn you are,
How blessed to plow down blindly,
To think nothing, to know nothing,
Only to breathe, only to feel. — Hermann Hesse

Just as apples when unripe are torn from trees, but when ripe and mellow drop down, so it is violence that takes life from young men, ripeness from old. This ripeness is so delightful to me that, as I approach nearer to death, I seem, as it were, to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Templeton was down there now, rummaging around. When he returned to the barn, he carried in his mouth an advertisement he had torn from a crumpled magazine.
How's this?" he asked, showing the ad to Charlotte.
It says 'Crunchy.' 'Crunchy' would be a good word to write in your web."
Just the wrong idea," replied Charlotte. "Couldn't be worse. We don't want Zuckerman to think Wilbur is crunchy. He might start thinking about crisp, crunchy bacon and tasty ham. That would put ideas into his head. We must advertise Wilbur's noble qualities, not his tastiness. — E.B. White

I've got all these great broads in me, all these character women. I was playing a torn-down stripper at twenty-five on Broadway, and now I fit the shoes. — Faith Prince

Brave, stupid girl, Thorne muttered. He sank back down to the floor, his expression torn between relief and increased distress. — Marissa Meyer

You can't tell from looking if it's being built up or torn down, Dunn thought. Can't tell creation from destruction at a distance. — Scott Cawthon

There's a guy walking around a war-torn country, and he comes across a girl who's been killed by a bomb. The guy drops to his knees and goddamn, he cries that it's the worst thing he's ever seen. 'Oh my God, it's terrible. Look at that poor little girl. I can't go on.' When the guy gets up, he walks a few steps and sees five kids who have also been killed and burned by a bomb. Oh God, this is really bad, he thinks, but he gets up and walks until he sees ten girls who have been killed and says, 'What a shame,' as he walks by. By the time he gets to a hundred children who have been bombed and killed, he doesn't even slow down to look. He just doesn't care anymore. — Ole Anderson

One thing he held against the bird force was the curse of knowing always which direction he was headed in, without the vaguest idea where he was going. He headed east this time, recalling as if it were yesterday every fifth or sixth mile of the road, where they hadn't torn it up, straightened it, bent it, laid it down again, and bordered it with regular houses planted eave-to-eave like an impenetrable, multicolored fence - soon a flag will wave from every antenna, we'll peek out at the savage world from a plaster fortress, nationwide. — Douglas Woolf

If the borderline rage that had fueled me for so long was torn down and taken away, would there be anything left? Or would it take the life, the spirit, right out of me? I was daunted by the prospect of letting go without a clear idea of what would emerge in the old framework's place. — Rachel Reiland

I know there is a moment when sound slips down the torn lining of itself into silence, is carried unheard and secret in its own pocket. But the crimson birds could find no such escape, no means of slipping beyond themselves between the cracks of color and song to a white undiscovered silence. — Janet Frame

He stalked into the room, leaned his long rifle against the mantelpiece and spread out his hands to the fire. He was clad from head to foot in fringed and beaded buckskin, which showed evidence of a long and arduous tramp. It was torn and wet and covered with mud. He was a magnificently made man, six feet in height, and stood straight as an arrow. His wide shoulders, and his muscular, though not heavy, limbs denoted wonderful strength and activity. His long hair, black as a raven's wing, hung far down his shoulders. Presently he turned and the light shone on a remarkable face. So calm and cold and stern it was that it seemed chiselled out of marble. The most striking features were its unusual pallor, and the eyes, which were coal black, and piercing as the dagger's point. — Zane Grey

Then, as if overnight, the three of us grew into teenagers and those nights turned into skulking down to the lake with stolen beer, cigarettes and dates. Those were by far the happiest days of my life. I have never laughed, loved or cried harder than I did during those years; we were your normal, hormonal, reckless teenage disasters. — Ariarlyn918

The idea of America's religious groups fighting over the limited public money to be made available takes us down the road towards the kind of sectarian competition that has torn so many nations apart, and which our separation of church and state has spared us. — David Saperstein

Now, it's time for me to lock up and go. Listen to me. Lock up an empty building that's gonna be torn down. Makes no sense. Like an old man tellin' a lie to his son from his death bed. What's the point? Who besides yourself are you fooling? — Dan Groat

I grew up having to care what people think; it was part of my job.I've been built up and torn down, built up and torn down. It's been difficult to tune people out, especially in the las few years. Now i'm starting to care more about me and not what everybody else thinks. — LeAnn Rimes

It's amazing, really, how in one instant a wall can be torn down, or climbed over. Misconceptions can be shattered, illusions dashed, dreams irrevocably ruined. Given the right frame of mind, within a heartbeat, people can begin the business of starting over. — Tamara Thiel

In the moonlight David saw that Thoresby had become very peculiar indeed. Figs nestled among the leaves of beech-trees. Elder-trees were bowed down with pomegranates. Ivy was almost torn from walls by the weight of ripe blackberries growing upon it. Anything which had ever possessed any sort of life had sprung fruitfulness. Ancient, dried up frames had become swollen with sap and we putting out twigs, leaves, blossoms and fruit. Door-frames and doors were so distorted that bricks had been pushed out of place and some houses were in danger of collapsing altogether. The cart in the middle of the high street was a grove of silver birches. Its broken wheels put forth briar roses and nightingales sang on it. — Susanna Clarke

If we are pack, then conquest is our sustenance, sister.
He plunged his hand into the coywolv's frame. With a wet tearing, the heart came out, glistening and full of blood, veins and arteries torn. The muscle of life. Tool held it out to her. "Our enemies give us strength." Blood ran from his fist. Mahlia saw the challenge in the half-man's eye.
She limped over to the battle-scarred monster and held out her hand. The heart was surprisingly heavy as Tool poured it into her palm. She lifted the muscle to her lips and bit deep.
Blood ran down her chin. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Once you cry it out, it's supposed to vanish ... right? It's not true. It's just ... a little less.
It was the first chink in my brickwall. The wall was still there. And it was still made of bricks,but one, maybe two, had been torn down — Tijan

In the space of a single year, a crumbling rural village had sprouted an army town, like a great parasitical growth. The former peacetime aspect of the place was barely discernible. The village pond was where the dragoons watered their horses, infantry exercised in the orchards, soldiers lay in the meadows sunning themselves. All the peacetime institutions collapsed, only what was needed for war remained. Hedges and fences were broken or simply torn down for easier access, and everywhere there were large signs giving directions to military traffic. While roofs caved in, and furniture was gradually used up as firewood, telephone lines and electricity cables were installed. Cellars were extended outwards and downwards to make bomb shelters for the residents; the removed earth was dumped in the gardens. The village no longer knew any demarcations or distinctions between thine and mine.
pp. 36-37 — Ernst Junger

Anaxagoras is said to have predicted that if the heavenly bodies should be loosened by some slip or shake, one of them might be torn away, and might plunge and fall down to earth; and he said that none of the stars was in its original position; for being of stone, and heavy, their shining light is caused by friction with the revolving aether, and they are forced along in fixed orbits by the whirling impulse which gave them their circular motion, and this was what prevented them from falling to our earth in the first place, when cold and heavy bodies were separated from universal matter. — Plutarch

Oh, how with more than dreams the soul is torn, ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes. — Paul Laurence Dunbar

There were movies to go see at the Gem, which has long since been torn down; science fiction movies like Gog with Richard Egan and westerns with Audie Murphy (Teddy saw every movie Audie Murphy made at least three times; he believed Murphy was almost a god) and war movies with John Wayne. There were games and endless bolted meals, lawns to mow, places to run to, walls to pitch pennies against, people to clap you on the back. And now I sit here trying to look through an IBM keyboard and see that time, trying to recall the best and the worst of that green and brown summer, and I can almost feel the skinny, scabbed boy still buried in this advancing body and hear those sounds. But — Stephen King

We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want after "the break" will be different from what we think we want before the break and both are necessarily different from the desire that issues from being in the break. — Anonymous

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture of their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land. — Martin Luther King Jr.

You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature. — Mahatma Gandhi

Step by step, heart to heart, left right left. We all fall down like toy soldiers. Bit by bit, torn apart, we never win. — Eminem

The lies we construct to defend ourselves from humiliation are the strongest, refusing to be torn down. — Sloane Crosley

It is only for a week or two that a broken chair or a door off its hinges is recognised for such. Soon, imperceptibly, it changes its character, and becomes the chair which is always left in the corner, the door which does not shut. A pin, fastening a torn valance, rusts itself into the texture of the stuff, is irremovable; the cracked dessert place and the stewpan with a hole in it, set aside until the man who rivets and solders should chance to come that way, become part of the dresser, are taken down and dusted and put back, and when the man arrives no one remembers them as things in need of repair. Five large keys rest inside the best soup-tureen, scrupulously preserved though no one knows what it was they once opened, and the pastry-cutter is there too, little missed, for the teacup without a handle has taken its place. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

What is that?"
"A hunt," Puck replied, looking off into the distance. He grimaced. "You know, I was just thinking we needed to be run down like rabbits and torn apart. My day just isn't complete without something trying to kill me."
-Puck — Julie Kagawa

These acts of ritualized destruction are known by anthropologists as "degradation ceremonies." Their purpose is to allow the public to single out and denounce one of its members. To lower their status or expel them from the group. To collectively take out our anger at them by stripping them of their dignity. It is a we-versus-you scenario with deep biological roots. By the end of it the disgraced person's status is cemented as "not one of us." Everything about them is torn down and rewritten. — Ryan Holiday

She builds people up because she knows what it is like to be torn down. — Shannon L. Alder

I never used to see anything on TV where the man was in the weaker position. It was always the female showing emotion, breaking down, being emotionally torn apart by men. — Sharon Horgan

It was called 'We Wear the Mask', by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I transcribed the first stanza and then started jotting down my reaction to it.

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, -
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

I used to wear masks so subtle I barely noticed them. A compliment to my mother after a dismal meal, a smile at my best friend when she sang out of tune, a forced laugh at my uncle's bad jokes. I wore small masks that came and went, like fleeting expressions.

I am stuck inside the mask I wear now. I want to rip it off. I want to show my scars to the world, to unveil the ugliness that breathes inside me. I want to be unashamed. I want to be unafraid. But every day the mask gets tighter, and I suffocate a little more.

I stopped writing. — Catherine Doyle

Hapi?" I asked.
"Why, yes, I am happy!" Hapi beamed. "I'm always happy because I'm Hapi! Are you happy?"
Zia frowned up at the giant. "Does he have to be so big?"
The god laughed. Immediately he shrank down to human size, though the crazy cheerful look on his face was still pretty unnerving.
"Oh, Setne!" Hapi chuckled and pushed the ghost playfully. "I hate this guy. Absolutely despise him!"
Hapi's smile became painfully wide. "I'd love to rip off your arms and legs, Setne. That would be amazing!"
Setne ... drifted a little farther away from the smiling god.
"Oh!" Hapi clapped excitedly. "The world is going to end tomorrow. I forgot!"
"You'd never get to Memphis without my help. You'd get torn into a million pieces!"
He seemed genuinely pleased to share that news. — Rick Riordan

The soldiers did go away and their towns were torn down; and in the Moon of Falling Leaves (November), they made a treaty with Red Cloud that said our country would be ours as long as grass should grow and water flow. — Black Elk

He wouldn't spend another standing in the darkness, hot and sick and shaking inside with a confused mess of feelings that weren't worth analyzing. That he shouldn't have felt anyway.
With Rachel gone it was like balancing on the edge of a cliff - and all the little wildflowers, the netting of grass and roots that kept the cliff from sliding into the sea below, were gone. It was just Matt standing there looking down, waiting to fall.
Even Rachel's memory, the sweet recollection of all they had built, all they had shared, was no longer strong enough to fight gravity. From the moment he had looked across the wet grass and seen Nathan Doyle standing in the shadow of a stone saber-toothed tiger, something had changed inside him. Something battened down had torn free, like a sail taking its first deep breath of sea air.
It terrified him.
And at the same time it exhilarated him.
Which terrified him all the more. — Josh Lanyon

... she does not resent her grief. No; the weakness of that word would make it a lie. To her, what hurts becomes immediately embodied: she looks on it as a thing that can be attacked, worried down, torn in shreds. Scarcely a substance herself, she grapples to conflict with abstractions. Before calamity she is a tigress; she rends her woes, shivers them in convulsed abhorrence. Pain, for her, has no result in good; tears water no harvest of wisdom; on sickness, on death itself, she looks with the eye of a rebel. Wicked, perhaps, she is, but also she is strong: and her strength has conqueredBeauty, has overcome Grace, and bound both at her side, captives peerlessly fair, and docile as fair. Even in the uttermost frenzy of energy is each maenad movement royally, imperially, incedingly upborne. ... Fallen, insurgent, banished, she remembers the heaven whereshe rebelled. — Charlotte Bronte

When [Vladimir] Putin, a former lieutenant-colonel in the KGB, became Russia's president on December 31, 1999 - eight years after the failed coup attempt against (then Soviet leader Mikhail) Gorbachev, and eight years after the people had torn down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the hated founder of the KGB, in Moscow - it was admittedly a shock. Nevertheless, I decided to give Putin a chance. He seemed dynamic and capable of learning. But I had to bury my hopes after just a few months. He proved to be an autocrat - and, because the West let him do as he pleased, he became a dictator. — Garry Kasparov

So what is it really like? What happens when people die? Noor asks Alice Bhatti, who after finishing her shift has changed into a loose maxi and is lying down on a wheelie stretcher, her forearm covering her eyes. A half-torn poster on the wall behind the stretcher says : Bhai, your blood will bring a revolution. Someone has scrawled under it with a marker: And that revolution will bring more blood. Someone has added Insha'allah in an attempt to introduce divine intervention into the proceedings. Some more down-to-earth soul has tried to give this revolution a direction, and drawn an arrow underneath and scribbled, Bhai, the Blood Bank is in Block C. — Mohammed Hanif

The broken pink pillars, in the half-light, might have been waiting to fall down on him: the pool, covered with green scum, its steps torn away and hanging by one rotting clamp, to close over his head. The shattered evil-smelling chapel, overgrown with weeds, the crumbling walls, splashed with urine, on which scorpions lurked - wrecked entablature, sad archivolt, slippery stones covered with excreta - this place, where love had once brooded, seemed part of a nightmare. — Malcolm Lowry

Week after week we were reduced to starting the same letter over again and copying out the same appeals, so that after a certain time words which had at first been torn bleeding from our hearts became void of sense. We copied them down mechanically, trying by means of these dead words to give some idea of our ordeal. And in the end, the conventional call of a telegram seemed to us preferable to this sterile, obstinate monologue and this arid conversation with a blank wall. — Albert Camus

Trout said this about all the stories he had torn to pieces and flushed down toilets or tossed into trash-strewn vacant lots, or whatever: 'Easy come, easy go. — Kurt Vonnegut

And Will knew what it was to see his daemon. As she flew down to the sand, he felt his heart tighten and release in a way he never forgot. Sixty years and more would go by, and as an old man he would still feel some sensations as bright and fresh as ever: Lyra's fingers putting the fruit between his lips under the gold-and-silver trees; her warm mouth pressing against his; his daemon being torn from his unsuspecting breast as they entered the world of the dead; and the sweet rightfulness of her coming back to him at the edge of the moonlight dunes. — Philip Pullman

The long gray two-story box was the newest structure on the property, having been built in the 1970s. The buildings up the hill had accumulated one by one since the 1920s, most of them incorporating bits salvaged from various torn-down hotels and movie sets. Their aunt Amity, affluent from the sales of her series of popular novels, had added to the architectural clutter after — Tim Powers

If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves ... There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. - ROBERT PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Donella H. Meadows

Because of the gnawing feeling that no matter how hard they work their efforts will yield nothing, that what they build up in one year will be torn down in one day by others. — Yann Martel

Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us. — J.G. Ballard

The glow dies down, and she's standing at the end of my bed
the one who's been following me around leaving feather messages. I take in the torn fishnets, plaid mini-kilt, shiny, riveted breastplate with leather straps at the sides and a worn Great Temolo decal near the left shoulder. Her wings are a crazy black-and-white-checkered pattern, like they've been spray-painted at a body shop to look like hipster sneakers. — Libba Bray

Marisa! Marisa! The cry was torn from Lord Asriel, and with the snow leopard beside her, with a roaring in her ears, Lyra's mother stood and found her footing and leapt with all her heart, to hurl herself against the angel and her daemon and her dying lover, and seize those beating wings, and bear them all down together into the abyss. — Philip Pullman

Oh! what waves of crime and bloodshed have swept like the waves of a deluge down the valley of the Rhine! War has laid his mailed hand on those desolate towers and ruthlessly torn down what time has spared, yet he could not mar the beauty of the shore, nor could Time himself hurl down the mountains that guard it. — Bayard Taylor

purple threaded evening. a torn goddess laying on the roof. milk sky. lavender hued moan against hot asphalt. the thickness of evening presses into your throat. polaroids taped to the ceiling. ivy pouring out of the cracks in the wall. i found my courage buried beneath molding books and forgot to lock the door behind me. the old house never forgets. opened my mouth and a dandelion fell out. reached behind my wisdom teeth and found sopping wet seeds. pulled all of my teeth out just to say i could. he drowned himself in a pill bottle and the orange really brought out his demise. lay me down on a bed of ground spices. there's a song there, i know it. amethyst geode eyes. cracked open. no one saw it coming.
october never loved you.
the moon still doesn't understand that. — Taylor Rhodes

I leaned forward, but Todd lifted a hand to stop me. "There's one more thing I've been meaning to tell you all day."
"What is it?" I asked impatiently, not able to keep from staring at his mouth.
He took his time, drawing in a slow inhale and then letting it out just as slowly. "You," he finally whispered, running a finger across my chin, "absolutely take my breath away."
It was right then that I knew, down to my curling toes and thumping heart, that I had made the correct decision, maybe the most correct decision ever to be made in the history of decision-making. I reached for him, torn between wanting to stare into his incredible green eyes and an almost painful desire to kiss him.
Naturally, we kissed. And kissed. — Ophelia London

The least dignified thing that can happen to a man is to be murdered. If he dies in his sleep he gets a respectful obituary and perhaps a smiling portrait; it is how we all want to be remembered. But murder is the great exposer: here is the victim in his torn underwear, face down on the floor, unpaid bills on his dresser, a meager shopping list, some loose change, and worst of all the fact that he is alone. Investigation reveals what he did that day - it all matters - his habits are examined, his behavior scrutinized, his trunks rifled, and a balance sheet is drawn up at the hospital giving the contents of his stomach. Dying, the last private act we perform, is made public: the murder victim has no secrets. — Paul Theroux

Goddamn Summerset. I've told him to leave my car when I park it."
"I think he did." Peabody flipped on her sunshades, pointed. "It's blocking the drive, see?"
"Oh, yeah." Eve cleared her throat. The car was just as she'd left it, and fluttering in the mild breeze were a few torn articles of clothing. "Don't ask," she muttered and started to hoof it down the drive.
"I wasn't going to." Peabody's voice was smooth as silk, "Speculation's more interesting. — J.D. Robb

I went into the living room and looked down at my mother's torn body and shook my head. It was surreal. I guess some people in that situation would have crumbled, some would have cried, but I'd emotionally disconnected from life a long time ago. For that, I had to thank the skeletal bitch on the floor, with her greedy rodent soul and her short-tempered ape-mate in the kitchen. If anything, her death was a belated answer to old prayers, with a bit of an unexpected mess. — Bobby Adair

Oh the torn up ticket stubs
From a hundred thousand mugs
Now washed away with dead dreams in the rain
And the carparks going up
And they're pulling down the pubs
And its just another bloody rainy day — Shane MacGowan

It was very important for me to touch on things that haven't changed, like schools. I'm in Cleveland, Ohio. My lady's from Ohio, and the schools are being torn down, and they turned them into high-rise condos. — Anthony Hamilton

Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered everywhere. — George Orwell

The problem with the word "vagina" is that vaginas seem to be just straight-out bad luck. Only a masochist would want one, because only awful things happen to them. Vaginas get torn. Vaginas get "examined.".. No. Let's clear this up right now - I don't actually have a vagina. I never have. I, personally, have a cunt. Cunt is a proper, old, historic, strong word, and it doubles up as the most potent swear word in the English language. Yeah. That's how powerful it is, guys. If I tell you what I've got down there, old ladies and clerics might faint. I like how shocked people are when you say "cunt." Compared to this, the most powerful swear word men have got out of their privates is "dick," which is frankly vanilla. In a culture where nearly everything female is still seen as squeam-inducing and/or weak - menstruation, menopause, just the sheer, simple act of calling someone "a girl" - I love that "cunt" stands on its own, as the supreme, unvanquishable word. — Caitlin Moran

Our weapons actually fall into two classifications. The first is resistance weapons, which are the ones that tear down the strongholds. The second classification is overcoming weapons, which are used to defeat the enemy or his demonic agents living in those strongholds. Both sets of weapons are necessary to defeat the enemy. However, they must be used in the right order; you can't overcome until you have resisted and torn down the strongholds the demonic are hiding behind. — Pastor George McVey

In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the Children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. And it might be that a sick child threw despair into the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people; that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck trough the night and filled a hundred people with the birth-joy in the morning ... Every night a world created, complete with furniture- friends made and enemies established; a world complete with braggarts and with cowards, with quiet men, with humble men, with kindly men. Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus. — John Steinbeck