Torrential Quotes & Sayings

I'd spent my life searching for something I couldn't name.
And as I drowned in the torrential flow of conflicting desires, caught in the relentless roar of water, earth, blood, and war, I reached out - wildly, desperately - and found it with him. — Emma Raveling

If left unchecked, global change will create violent conflict, torrential storms, shrinking coastlines, and irreversible catastrophe. — Valerie Jarrett

My favourite pool is located in a remote valley in the eastern Lake District, surrounded by vine-hung cliffs and slippery boulders. It has a torrential sheet waterfall at one end and is almost black in colour, so it appears bottomless, a portal to nowhere. — Sarah Hall

Of course I'm not supposed to admit that there is triannual torrential sobbing in my office, because it's bad for the feminist cause. It makes it harder for women to be taken seriously in the workplace. It makes it harder for other working moms to justify their choice. But I have friends who stay home with their kids and they also have a triannual sob, so I think we should call it even. I think we should be kind to one another about it. I think we should agree to blame the children. — Tina Fey

Maybe I need to immerse the fabric of my soul in torrential nature of Christmas, and in doing so to finally understand that it is the very thing that can make the world what I so wish it were. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

After a torrential rain. Acadia and her — James Patterson

She thought soon all the land would sound like nothing, and no one would know it had once made sounds, that small civilizations had thrived in the grass. It would never register with life again. And what was coming? Concrete. Glassed fronts and sale signs and cash registers. And with it all, people in a torrential surge, carnivorous men and women looking to smear their skin with colors and creams, to bleach their hair, to shave their hides, to cinch themselves breathless in order to think themselves beautiful. — C.E. Morgan

From Flood, Flash, and Pheromones
coming soon:
In the torrential downpour with water swirling that threatened to pull her down, she didn't see the voice's owner. The hurricane had blessed the entire city with a surprise drenching. All weather reports had predicted it to pass over with sporadic rainfall but that didn't happen. The storm settled over Houston as if it had no intention to move on. Cassie flailed in panic as the roof of her car disappeared under the water twenty feet beyond. She prayed once more that the container in it was watertight. And that she'd see her car again. Then she concentrated on living. Where had the voice come from? — Shelley K. Wall

Trust in Creation which is made fresh daily and doesn't suffer in translation. This God does not work in especially mysterious ways. The sun here rises and sets at six exactly. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly. A bird raises its brood in the forest and a greenheart tree will only grow from a greenheart seed. He brings drought sometimes followed by torrential rains and if these things aren't always what I had in mind, they aren't my punishment either. They're rewards, let's say for the patience of a seed. — Barbara Kingsolver

Is there any finer phrase in the English language than Midsummer Day? There are no words to touch it for conjuring. It is the beginning of blooming roses and ripening corn, of days that stretch on, reaching for midnight until the spangled blue velvet of night descends and beginning again before cockcrow, when the dew jewels the grass like diamonds scattered while the earth slumbers. I, of course, expected rain. Not just rain, but torrential, heaving, biblical rain - the sort to set arks afloat. Everything else had gone awry, why not that? But when I awoke on Midsummer Day, the sun greeted me cordially, coaxing the dew from the grass and the early roses as a light breeze wafted the scent of charred chimney over the gardens. I stood at the window and breathed in deeply all the scents of summer, fresh grass and carp ponds and blossoming herb knots until the whole of it mingled in my head and made me dizzy. A bee floated lazily in the window and out again as if beckoning me to follow. — Deanna Raybourn

Figure two-, three-hundred-kilometer-an-hour winds, lightning, torrential rains. You're far enough inland to avoid the three-kilometer-high tsunami." "Basic wrath of God package, minus drowning, — James S.A. Corey

She had something Adam didn't. Curiosity. First step to growth
and if it wasn't for Eve's Adam would still be sitting by the side of the pool picking his nose and scratching his scalp, bamboozled by his own reflection. Off in her part of Eden, Eve hadn't bothered naming the animals. On the other hand she'd discovered how to milk some of them and how best to eat the eggs of others. She'd decided she wasn't overly keen on torrential rain and had built a shelter from bamboo and banana leaves, into which she'd retire when the heavens opened, having set out coconut shells to catch the rainwater with a view to saving herself the schlep down to the spring every time she wanted a drink. The only thing you won't be surprised to hear about is that she'd already domesticated a cat and called it Misty. — Glen Duncan

I will always be there, I will say to you, the next time. Even after the door. It's neither a gift nor a promise. It's a natural phenomenon. As durable but no more so than a mountain. You can climb on me for millions of years. I am stable, etched by ravines, immobile, torn and flooded by torrential springs. — Helene Cixous

It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness. — Bessie Head

Increasingly, during those classes, longings had seized me, foreign, torrential aches that overran my heart. I wanted to know things, to become someone. — Sue Monk Kidd

My aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training died long ago, as a teenager, on a white-knuckled ferry ride to Elba during a torrential rainstorm [Kushner, Rachel, Diary, London Review of Books, January 14, 2015]. — Rachel Kushner

Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, joyful, steady, filling the earth, collecting in underground springs. When it rains, when we love, life grows. — Carol Gilligan

The rain fluctuates between drizzle and torrential. It messes with your mind. It makes you think things will always be like this, never getting better, always letting you down right when you though the worst was over. — Susane Colasanti

He turned his dark eyes on the girl whom he had dreamed of so often over the previous months. Beside him, at that very moment of existence, at the heart of torrential downpour, she was exquisitely real, and she, too, seemed content to go on sitting there forever. — Anna Godbersen

The greatest crisis of our lives is neither economic, intellectual, nor even what we usually call religious. It is a crisis of imagination. We get stuck on our paths because we are unable to reimagine our lives differently from what they are right now. We hold on desperately to the status quo, afraid that if we let go, we will be swept away by the torrential undercurrents of our emptiness. — Marc Gafni

The Lurking Fear:
Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined condors of purple fulgurous sky ... formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous over-nourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion ... insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation ... Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept under the calm stars of clearing skies. — H.P. Lovecraft

My response came without thinking. I made a gesture that said, I know. I believe you. And when he held out his hand to help me up the bank, I took it without flinching, as I had done once before in a torrential downpour, when that hand had been my only grip on reality in a flight from death. I trusted him. He was a Briton, and I trusted him. — Juliet Marillier

When torrential water tosses boulders, it is because of its momentum. When the strike of a hawk breaks the body of its prey, it is because of timing. — Sun Tzu

God's great grace wipes out everything else on the landscape. It is not puny but plentiful. Not teeny but torrential. Not mini but majestic. It meets us right now and equips us with courage, wisdom, and strength. So hang on - the next wave is coming! — Max Lucado

I would use the same word to describe both my joy and the rain: torrential. This - this - this is all I ever wanted from the world: wide-open spaces and cooling rain and the chance to run. — Beth Revis

There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us. Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you "Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?" - Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent. Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn't. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel. — Irvin D. Yalom

In a bull market, one must avoid the error of the preening duck that quacks boastfully after a torrential rainstorm, thinking that its paddling skills have caused it to rise in the world. A right-thinking duck would instead compare its position after the downpour to that of the other ducks on the pond. — Warren Buffett

It has been an assault on her senses: smells that suddenly overpower her, and heat she can taste, thick as dust on her tongue. Not only does she feel powerless in the face of Indian bureaucracy, but as further punishment, the torrential downpours also keep them trapped inside Krishnan's parents' flat. — Shilpi Somaya Gowda

If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through that shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them? — Stephen King

Soon the heavens will burst and torrential rains will flood the earth. The sea will rise and submerge the land. When this happens collect the seed of every plant and a pair of every animal and wait for me on a boat with your wife.' Realizing this was no ordinary fish, but Vishnu himself, Satyavrata did as he was told. The great fish appeared before him, bigger than before, with a horn on its head. Satyavrata tied his boat to the horn with Adi Sesha as the rope. The fish then towed the boat through the great deluge to the only piece of dry land, the peak of Mount Mandara. There Satyavrata and his wife waited for the waters to recede. With the seed of every plant and a pair of all animals he would establish the new world. (Bhagavata Purana) — Devdutt Pattanaik

And the Morrigan, I noted, had been right about thrice-cursed trickster gods. They were torrential fucksluices spraying their happy juices on the innocent and the damned alike. — Kevin Hearne

February. Get ink, shed tears. Write of it, sob your heart out, sing, While torrential slush that roars Burns in the blackness of the spring. Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas, Race through the noice of bells and wheels To where the ink and all you grieving Are muffled when the rainshower falls. To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal, A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees, Fall down into the puddles, hurl Dry sadness deep into the eyes. Below, the wet black earth shows through, With sudden cries the wind is pitted, The more haphazard, the more true The poetry that sobs its heart out. — Boris Pasternak

Through surrender the aspirant's ego is effaced, and ... grace ... pours down upon him like a torrential rain. — B.K.S. Iyengar

Today not even a universal fire could make the torrential poetic production of our time disappear. But it is exactly a question of production, that is, of hand-made products which are subject to the laws of taste and fashion. — Eugenio Montale

His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that ... only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it. — Anais Nin

The ability to row in any conditions, raging crosswind, two-foot tall jet ski wakes, torrential downpour, is absolutely essential in order to be a champion sculler. It all comes under the heading of boatmanship. Some races are won on nothing more than superior boatmanship. — Brad Alan Lewis

The effect of climate change is not simply to reduce rain during the summer months, but also to increase the number of torrential storms. When the rain falls that hard and fast, it cannot sink into the ground and go down to the aquifers. — Nick Davies

Shreiking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguinated condors of purple fulgurous sky ... formless phantasms and kalaidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous over-nourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion ... insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation ... — H.P. Lovecraft

The strong wind cannot last the whole morning, the torrential rain cannot last all day. It is nature that causes these things, but even nature cannot cause them to go on forever. If nature cannot do this, then certainly man cannot do so. — Lao-Tzu

One preacher described it as if you and I were standing a short hundred yards away from a dam of water ten thousand miles high and ten thousand miles wide. All of a sudden that dam was breached, and a torrential flood of water came crashing toward us. Right before it reached our feet, the ground in front of us opened up and swallowed it all. At the Cross, Christ drank the full cup of the wrath of God, and when he had downed the last drop, he turned the cup over and cried out, "It is finished." This is the gospel. — David Platt