Truncated Quotes & Sayings

The forms of the short, written poem as they have been developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as compressed, truncated, or fragmented imitations of other verbal forms, especially the play, story, public oration, and personal essay. — Robert Scholes

she learned words that rolled from her tongue when no one was listening. Firns and striations. Cirques and moraines. Adulation. Sublimation. She fell asleep to their music, and she woke to it. Chatter marks, eskers, and drumlins. Truncated spurs. Corries and tarns. Kames. Eolian loess. Katabatic winds. — Deb Vanasse

Many ills of the Christian life are due to handicapped beginnings. Too many people are preaching a warped or truncated gospel, and spiritual birth defects are the inevitable result. — J. Edwin Orr

I found the head nurse and asked her, and she said Dan has been flown back to America on account of they can take better care of him there. I asked her if he is okay, and she said, 'Yeah, if you can call two punctured lungs, a severed intestine, spinal separation, a missing foot, a truncated leg, and third degree burns over half the body okay, then he is just fine. I thanked her, and went on my way. — Winston Groom

The absurdity of it, she thought, this quest for the love of a man who was her equal. She loathed herself for it. She thought of her life (and herself) as a missed opportunity. Somewhere, back there, she had missed something. What was it? When was it? The worse horror beneath: that she hadn't missed anything, that her life was merely the sum of her choices and that her choices had led her to this: another truncated encounter; the carcinogenic belief in the idea of a Great Love; clammy sex; loneliness in the small hours. — Glen Duncan

Mappo frowned. 'I have not heard that phrase before. Lost Elementals?'
'Scholars tend to acknowledge but four, generally: water, fire, earth and air; yet others exist. ( ... ) Life, death, dark, light, shadow ... possibly, but even that seems a truncated selection. What of, for example, time? Past, present, future? What of desire, and deed? Sound, silence? Or are the latter two but minor aspects of air? Does time belong to light? Or is it but a point somewhere between light and dark, yet distinct from shadow? What of faith and denial? Can you now understand, Mappo, the potential complexity of relationships?'
'Assuming they exist at all, beyond the notion of concepts.'
'Granted. Yet, maybe concepts are all that's needed, if the purpose of the elements is to give shape and meaning to all that surrounds us on the outside, and all that guides us from within. — Steven Erikson

They were walking along a roadway of great slabs of stone set down one after another, the beginning and end of which they could take in at a glance, a road rising from and heading toward nowhere now.
"You can't get there from here," William said, using a Down East accent. "Anymore." Maine, they thought of Maine, then. Evidently this truncated road could still carry them as far away and as long ago as that. — Nancy Clark

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal. — Dorothy Allison

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English. — Noam Chomsky

Roots can live without branches, although truncated; branches cannot live without roots. — David Novak

As the sun rose I could see Etna, a truncated cone with a plume of smoke over it like the quill of a pen stuck in a pewter inkpot, rising out of the haze to the north of where I was treading water. — Eric Newby

Every line of true knowledge must find its completeness as it converges on God, just as every beam of daylight leads the eye to the sun. If religion is excluded from our study, every process of thought will be arrested before it reaches its proper goal. The structure of thought must remain a truncated cone, with its proper apex lacking. — Robert Dabney

At this point there were good days, good weeks, when we pretended that it was acceptable that Jack had lived at all, that his life had been, in its truncated way, complete. This wasn't one of those days. — Dave Eggers

A writer who presents men and women as creatures truncated below the waist is exposed as one who goes about without his trousers saying, 'see, I have had my testicles removed.' — Norman Lindsay

There are pictures of Kim and Mia from high school and one of the two of them posing on top of the Empire State Building - a jolting reminder that their relationship wasn't truncated, they have a history of which I know nothing. — Gayle Forman

God is not grieved because of "all the homosexuals." Not in the very least. That's religious people you're thinking of. If God is grieved it's because the beautiful, incomparable message of redemption and grace, the sweet peace of a loving relationship, has been truncated, rerouted into a message of behavior-modification and sin-management. For — Susan Cottrell

Among all things that can be contemplated under the concavity of the heavens, nothing is seen that arouses the human spirit more, that ravishes the senses more, that horrifies more, that provokes more terror and admiration than the monsters, prodigies and abominations through which we see the works of nature inverted, mutilated and truncated. — Pierre Boaistuau

Each opinion, each view is necessarily partial, truncated, inadequate. In philosophy and in anything, originality comes down to incomplete definitions. — Emil Cioran

PERIODIC MOOD-CHANGES We have already spoken of the affective concomitants of common migraines - elated and irritable prodromal states, states of dread and depression associated with the main phase of the attack, and states of euphoric rebound. Any or all of these may be abstracted as isolated periodic symptoms of relatively short duration - some hours, or at most two or three days, and as such may present themselves as primary emotional disorders. The most acute of these mood-changes, generally no more than an hour in duration, usually represents concomitants or equivalents of migraine aura. We may confine our attention at this stage to attacks of depression, or truncated manic-depressive cycles, occurring at intervals in patients who have previously suffered from attacks of undoubted (classical, common, abdominal, etc.) migraine. — Oliver Sacks

Opposite the Half-Axe was the narrow-fronted entrance to a shop devoted to short lengths of rope and wooden poles a man and a half high. Tehol had no idea how such a specialized enterprise could survive, especially in this unravelled, truncated market, yet its door had remained open for almost six centuries, locked up each night by a short length of rope and a wooden pole. — Steven Erikson

We're in a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter ... [Language] is being eroded
it's changing. Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us. — Ralph Fiennes

Long-distance train conversations are unlike the perfunctory exchanges one normally associates with strangers, or the truncated, cut-to-the-chase kind that sometimes take place between seatmates on a plane. — Alan Huffman

[F]or all its reputation for conservatism, cricket in its history has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for innovation. What game has survived subjection to such extraordinary manipulations, having been prolonged to 10 days (in Durban 70 years ago), truncated to as few as 60 balls (in Hong Kong every year), and remained recognisable in each instance? — Gideon Haigh

Our choices are truncated in evil's presence. — Michael Ventura

Jess again. Mark had called her Jessica. As if she were a full person, not a truncated portion of one. — Courtney Milan

There is something worse than holding our silence while the lost of this world run headlong into hell: the crime of preaching to a different gospel than the one passed down to the saints. For this reason, we must shun the gospel of contemporary evangelicalism, for it is a watered-down, culturally carved, truncated gospel that allows men to hold to a form of godliness while denying its power, to profess to know God while denying Him with their deeds, and to call Jesus "Lord, Lord," while not doing the Father's will.15 Woe to us if we do not preach the gospel, but even greater woe is due us if we preach it incorrectly!16 — Paul David Washer

I'm interested in producing truncated shapes in proportion to the frame and composition, shapes that are preferably luminous. I'm not interested in the full-figure. I want to abstract forms. — Ralph Gibson

If only there were an inhabited field of discourse where Christians were thinking Christianly about everything, there would be something nutritive for Christian minds to feed on. But Christians are being truncated and deformed by the fact that men and women have to leap about from one tradition of discourse to another as they move in thought and discussion from moral matters to political matters, from ecclesiastical matters, to cultural matters. — Harry Blamires

The Gospel that worked in the 20th Century may not work in the 21st Century. The reason is because it is truncated. It only speaks of "Sin and Salvation" and not of the COSMIC GOSPEL that transforms all things. — Peter Robinson

The wind blew through the window. The trousers swayed. Doubtless when they were on Mr. Craggs, the trousers looked splendid and went perfectly well together with his body. But like this, isolated in space, Mr. Cragg's trousers were nightmarish.
The wind blew through the window. As they swayed, the trousers were alive. A shot, truncated, square creature consisting entirely of legs, belly and what went with them. And now it would get down and start walking among people and over people and grow and ... — Yevgeny Zamyatin

In greeting, we Southerners say "hey" not "hi." To alert, draw the attention of, or show objection to another, we also say "hey," but air is expelled and the ending is truncated. This — Kathy Reichs

In short, dozens of conflicting, truncated impressions were already teasing to be understood, but the wisest course seemed to me to keep them to myself so long as I didn't begin to know what they added up to. — Philip Roth

He checks the horns. They're small: not truncated like Hellboy's, but wee, budding, trainer-bra efforts. Definitely not the thing that killed Dazza. In demon terms, he's looking at a midget or a waen. He recalls the ten second rule, and though they only clashed for a moment, it was more than enough. He understands. He has the measure. There is no paralysis by fear. There will be no subconscious surrender to superior mental force and aggression.
In short, he can take this cunt. — Christopher Brookmyre

As for my own truncated secondary education, my head was in the clouds as my mom would say, or if you asked my father, up my ass. — Michael J. Fox

The fact remains that the materialistic view is a truncated view of reality. — Stephen C. Meyer

I don't think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn't be the person I am today if it wasn't for the opportunities the library gave me. — Alan Moore

A text conversation is a short exchange of often grossly truncated language that corresponds to a thought made all the more shallow by the process. — Henry Rollins

Perfect worlds do not exist. There are only the funny, strange, weeping, singing, truncated, and imperfect universes created by the gods of paintbrush and musical instruments, the gods who infuse their creations with their own blood, their own soul. When he looks at these worlds, the true Lord of Hosts, the creator of the universe, probably cannot help but smile mockingly — Vasily Grossman