Us Steel Quotes & Sayings

When we get older - when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another - we know that real suffering is measured by what's taken away from us. — Gregory David Roberts

Consider this: when you stand at the entry to a steel factory, you can make out through the smoke some men, some metal, the fires. The furnaces roar, the hammers crash; and the metalworkers who forge ingots, weapons, tools, and so on are completely ignorant of the real uses to which their products will be put. The workers can only refer to their products by conventional names. Well, that's where we all stand, all of us! Nobody can see the real character of what he creates because every knife blade may become a dagger, and the use to which an object is put changes both its name and its nature. Only our ignorance shields us from terrible responsibilities. — Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

An army of experts assured us on a daily basis that this boom couldn't possibly crash like previous booms because this boom was still going on whereas all previous booms had ended. — Mark Steel

Today "aged" foods like sauerkraut, miso, and tempeh are fermented in hygienically sanitized stainless-steel vats to assure cleanliness, so we can no longer be sure they will provide us with the B12 we need. Vegans should not mess around with this issue. — Sharon Gannon

Whatever we decide we don't want in life (whether it's dating, houses, neighborhoods, jobs, partners, or dogs), the fates usually intervene to open our eyes and prove us wrong. — Danielle Steel

SohelpmeGod if there weren't a hundred people staring at us, I would have his nuts in a vice. A steel one. With teeth. — Alessandra Torre

He spoke of what he called the "inner history of weakness, of what disappoints us in leaders, the timidity of thought, the hesitancy and the drift." In these cases imagination and will are often blinded by "constructed evils," he wrote. "We falter from childhood amidst shames and fears, we move in closed spaces where stale tradition enervates, we grow hysterical over success and failure, and so by surrounding instinct with terror, we prepare the soul for weakness. — Ronald Steel

People tend to think of brain surgeons as being very dextrous," the neurosurgeon replied, "but it's the plastic surgeons and microvascular surgeons who do that meticulous stuff." He indicated the slide on the wall: a patient's brain with an aerial array of steel rods, clamps and wires. "The rest of us just go gardening. — Gavin Francis

New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance - romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we'll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we'll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot. — Andre Aciman

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future. — Yukio Mishima

I suspect if we were as familiar with our bones as with our skin, we'd never bury dead but shrine them in their rooms, arranged as we might like to find them on a visit; and our enemies, if we could steal their bodies from the battle sites, would be museumed as they died, the steel still eloquent in their sides, their metal hats askew, the protective toes of their shoes unworn, and friend and enemy would be so wondrously historical that in a hundred years we'd find the jaws still hung for the same speech and all the parts we spent our life with titled as they always were - rib cage, collar, skull - still repetitious, still defiant, angel light, still worthy of memorial and affection. After all, what does it mean to say that when our cat has bitten through the shell and put confusion in the pulp, the life goes out of them? Alas for us, I want to cry, our bones are secret, showing last, so we must love what perishes: the muscles and the waters and the fats. — William H Gass

Anguish. German soldiers--with their steel helmets and their death's-head emblem. Still, our first impression of the Germans were rather reassuring. The officers were billeted in private homes, even in Jewish homes. Their attitude toward their hosts was distant but polite. They never demanded the impossible, made no offensive remarks, and sometimes even smiled at the lady of the house. A German officer lodged in the Kahns' house across the street from us. We were told he was a charming man, calm, likable, and polite. Three days after he moved in, he brought Mrs. Kahn a box of chocolates. The optimists were jubilant: "Well? What did we tell you? You wouldn't believe us. There they are, your Germans. What do you say now? Where is their famous cruelty?

The Germans were already in our town, the Fascists were already in power, the verdict was already out--and the Jews of Sighet were still smiling. — Eli Wiesel

I don't believe that the American people want us to focus on our job security. They want us to focus on their job security. I don't think they want more gridlock. I don't think they want more partisanship. I don't think they want more obstruction. They didn't send us to Washington to fight each other in some sort of political steel-cage match to see who comes out alive. That's not what they want. They sent us to Washington to work together, to get things done, and to solve the problems that they're grappling with every single day. — Barack Obama

You cannot make steel until you have made the iron white-hot in fire. It is not meant for harm. Trouble and disease have a lesson for us. Our painful experiences are not meant to destroy us, but to burn out our dross, to hurry us back Home. No one is more anxious for our release than God. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Bruce is still my friend. We don't talk much. We don't have to. He is great and in his own league. I'm not him and he is not me. But we are on similar paths, writing and singing out own kind of songs around the world, along with Bob and a few other singer/songwriters. It is a a silent fraternity of sorts, occupying this space in people's souls with our music. Last year, I lost my right-hand man, the pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith. This year Bruce lost his right-hand man, the saxophonist Clarence Clemons. It's time for another talk; friends can help each other just by being there. Now both of us will look to our right and see a giant hole, a memory, the past and the future. I won't play with another steel player trying to recreate Ben's parts, and I know Bruce won't play with another sax man trying to play Clarence's. Those parts are not going to happen again. They already did. That takes a lot out of our repertoires. — Neil Young

We are always better than before when those we love inflict wounds upon us. — Danielle Steel

If there's any chance of salvaging things between us - and I must be crazy to even consider that - you need to start off with a huge apology," I stated without preamble.
His arms folded across his chest. With that stunning jewel-encrusted coat adding to his already commanding presence, I felt like I'd somehow shrunk several feet, but I refused to be cowed. I stood straighter and began to tap my foot.
He glanced down. "Is that supposed to intimidate me?" he asked, his voice edged with satin-covered steel. — Jeaniene Frost

People in Japan and the Faeroe Islands kill dolphins and pilot whales by running steel rods into their spinal columns while they squeal in pain and terror and thrash in agony. (In Japan, it's illegal to kill cows and pigs as painfully and inhumanely as they kill dolphins.) The lack of compassion for dolphins and whales indicates that humans' "theory of mind" is incomplete. We have an empathy shortfall, a compassion deficit. And human-on-human violence, abuse, and ethnic and religious genocide are all too pervasive in our world. No elephant will ever pilot a jetliner. And no elephant will ever pilot a jetliner into the World Trade Center. We have the capacity for wider compassion, but we don't fully live up to ourselves. Why do human egos seem so threatened by the thought that other animals think and feel? Is it because acknowledging the mind of another makes it harder to abuse them? We seem so unfinished and so defensive. Maybe incompleteness is one of the things that "makes us human. — Carl Safina

Set flush in the wall behind the desk was a steel door. It was knobless, and along one edge were three brass keyholes spaced a few inches apart. Rube brought out a key ring, selected a key, then walked around the desk, inserted the key in the topmost lock, and turned it. From his watch pocket he took a single key, pushed it into the middle keyhole, and turned. The guard stood waiting beside him, and now the guard inserted a key in the bottom keyhole, turned it and pulled the door open with the key. Rube removed his two keys and gestured me in through the open door before him. He followed, and the door swung solidly shut behind us. I heard the multiple click of the locks engaging, and we were standing in a space hardly larger than a big closet, dimly lighted by an overhead bulb in a wire cage. Then I saw that we were at the top of a circular metal staircase. — Jack Finney

My friends ... today, we are not Fey, Celierian, or dahl'reisen, but brothers, united and strong, each of us honorable and worthy warriors of Light. We are the steel no enemy can shatter. We are the magic no Dark power can defeat. We are the rock upon which evil breaks like waves. We are warriors of honor, champions of Light. — C.L. Wilson

Tories never actually talk about getting rid of their leader, then suddenly there us a flash of steel betweent he shoulder-blades and rigormortis sets in. — Harold Wilson

Let us see as steadily and completely as possible the realities of our age: the wasted lives, the scattered and misused resources (human and material), the steel magic of the misdirected machinery, the mad clockwork tragedy of it all. — Clarence John Laughlin

Ranks of men on foot, men with shields, men with weapons, a shield wall that was meant to awe us, and it did.
A shield wall is a terrible thing. It is a wall of wood, iron, and steel with one purpose alone, to kill.
And this shield wall was massive, a wall of painted round shields stretching wide across the ridge's flat top, and above it were the banners of the jarls, chieftains, and kings who had come to kill us. — Bernard Cornwell

Well, at first, I was sure that he would feel the cosmic forces pulling us together. I wanted him so badly, I could feel my heart racing for him with every beat. It was destiny. He was a magnet and I was steel. — Rainbow Rowell

In the castle of Benwick, the French boy was looking at his face in the polished surface of a kettle-hat. It flashed in the sunlight with the stubborn gleam of metal. It was practically the same as the steel helmet which soldiers still wear, and it did not make a good mirror, but it was the best he could get. He turned the hat in various directions, hoping to get an average idea of his face from the different distoritons which the bulges made. He was trying to find out what he was, and he was afraid of what he would find.
The boy thought that there was something wrong with him. All through his life
even when he was a great man with the world at his feet
he was to feel this gap: something at the bototm of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand. There is no need for us to try to understand it. We do not have to dabble in a place which he preferred to keep secret. — T.H. White

Grant us the wil1 to fashion as we feel, Grant us the strength to labor as we know, Grant us the purpose, ribbed and edged with steel, To strike the blow. — John Drinkwater

Give the wilding an axe, why not?" He pointed out Mormont's weapon, a short-hafted battle-axe with gold scrollwork inlaid on the black steel blade. "He'll give it back, I vow. Buried in the Old Bear's skull, like as not. why not give him all our axes, and our swords as well? I mislike the way the clank and rattle as we ride. We'd travel faster without them, straight to hell's door. Does it rain in hell, I wonder? Perhaps Craster would like a nice hat instead."
Jon smiled. "He wants an axe. And wine as well."
"See, the Old Bear's clever. If we get the wildling well and truly drunk, perhaps he'll only cut off an ear when he tries to slay us with that axe. I have two ears but only one head. — George R R Martin

No one would believe that in this howling waste there could still be men; but steel helmets now appear on all sides out of the trench, and fifty yards from us a machine-gun is already in position and barking. The wire entanglements are torn to pieces. Yet they offer some obstacle. We see the storm-troops coming. Our artillery opens fire. Machine-guns rattle, rifles crack. — Erich Maria Remarque

Any act often repeated soon forms a habit; and habit allowed, steady gains in strength, At first it may be but as a spider's web, easily broken through, but if not resisted it soon binds us with chains of steel. — Tryon Edwards

... the kids, they took us places we never would have gone to on our own. Some times were great... some times were wretched... And there was still no guarantee, no bulletproof glass, safety net, steel-toed boots, anything at all that would promise more good moments... so was it enough? It was. — Mary J. Koral

Conquest by force is not sanctioned by God. The Americans have no right to be here. We will defeat them because we believe that this land they usurp is ours; God created it for us. The whole history of mankind has shown how faith endures while steel rusts.
-Istak — F. Sionil Jose

We had not got halfway to the door before she had overtaken us and was holding his arm. She had turned in a moment from steel to velvet. "Come and sit down, gentlemen. Let us talk this matter over. I feel that I may be frank with you, Mr. Holmes. You have the feelings of a gentleman. How quick a woman's instinct is to find it out. I will treat you as a friend." "I cannot promise to reciprocate, madame. I am not the law, but I represent justice so far as my feeble powers go. I am ready to listen, and then I will tell you how I will act." "No doubt it was foolish of me to threaten a brave man like yourself. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Eventually, the room was cleared, and we stood there together, chests heaving, a spray of shifters and humans on the floor in front of us. We weren't entirely undamaged - I'd taken a bruising shot to my right thigh, and Ethan had slices across his belly where he'd been caught with the edge of a bar of steel broken from someone's office chair.
But we were alive.
We glanced over at each other. I was just about to speak, but before I could get out words, his hand was at the back of my head, his mouth pressing against mine. The intensely possessive kiss left me gasping for breath, but even as he pulled back, his fingers stayed knotted in the back of my hair. — Chloe Neill

One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, How beautiful the world could be ... — Viktor E. Frankl

We endure the strokes like anvils or hard steel,
Till pain itself make us no pain to feel. — John Webster

Every time he studied this instrument, with its slender, gleaming steel rod that tapered down to such needle-like sharpness, he wondered why it was necessary to have things like this in the world. If it were truly only for chopping ice, you'd think a completely different design might do. The people who produce and sell things like this don't understand, he thought. They don't realize that some of us break out in a cold sweat at just a glimpse of that shiny, pointed tip. — Ryu Murakami

It is a known fact that the sheep that give us steel wool have no natural enemies. — Gary Larson

Though emotion roughened his voice, he spoke quietly. This was only for her. "I am your sword and your shield. I am your wolf and your steed. Mountains will tremble at my approach, for they know I will tear them apart if they stand between us. But you need not be afraid, Zenobia Fox, because my heart is iron and my will is steel, and before the new moon rises, I will come for you"
... He kissed her and as he pulled away, he wasn't leaving her. It was just the first step back to her side. — Meljean Brook

Sometimes we have to face the things that hurt us most. Maybe you won't heal till you do. You haven't yet." They both knew that was true. "You can't move ahead until you bury the past. — Danielle Steel

I try to write about the stuff that torments us all. — Danielle Steel

Maybe some people just aren't meant to be in our lives forever. Maybe some people are just passing through. It's like some people just come through our lives to bring us something: a gift, a blessing, a lesson we need to learn. And that's why they're here. You'll have that gift forever. — Danielle Steel

The United States is like one big jail for Black people, because we're locked into a mentality and a mindset that limits our potential. It has us against us. — Chuck D

Who doesn't need hope in their lives: hope that something can change, that someone cares, that not only bad things happen unexpectedly but good things can happen to us too? — Danielle Steel

Max and the driver, pulling out steel mats, spades, and various other things from the car, endeavoured to free us, but with no success. Hour succeeded hour. It was still ragingly hot. I lay down in the shelter of the car, or what shelter there was on one side of it, and went to sleep. Max told me afterwards, whether truthfully or not, that it was at that moment he decided that I would make an excellent wife for him. 'No fuss!' he said. 'You didn't complain or say that it was my fault, or that we never should have stopped there. You seemed not to care whether we went on or not. Really it was at that moment I began to think you were wonderful. — Agatha Christie

Erich, they differ from us only in the limitations imposed upon them by stone, as opposed to iron and steel. — Torsten Krol

Pop culture. Nobody does bullshit better than us. Right? China took over manufacturing. And the Middle East has us on fossil fuels. That's just geography and politics. We're a nation of whacko immigrants. Scavengers and con men. We crossed the ocean on faith, stole some land and stone-cold made up a whole country out of nothing but balls and bullshit. Superhero comics got invented by crazy genius Jews who showed up and revamped the refugee experience into a Man of Steel sent from Krypton with a secret identity. — Damon Suede

At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and painful moments. Like the ever flowing water of a river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changin cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of the summers and the piercing chill of its winters. But through it all, God walks with us. Never forget that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We make our customs lightly; once made, like our sins, they grip us in bands of steel; we become the creatures of our creation. — Charles W. Chesnutt

And if they really fuck it up and do make a horrible mistake, which can happen to anyone, from any culture, you still have to sit back and watch from the sidelines. It's their life. What you need is a life of your own. You can't hang on to them forever and live theirs or stop them from making mistakes. That's the deal. Once they grow up, they belong to themselves, not to us. — Danielle Steel

You have the heart one expects to see at the centre of a fire, bending and twisting like steel, but never breaking. If something happens to mine, yours would be stubborn enough to beat for both of us. — Pam Godwin

A boy needs a father to show him how to be in the world. He needs to be given swagger, taught how to read a map so that he can recognize the roads that lead to life and the paths that lead to death, how to know what love requires, and where to find steel in the heart when life makes demands on us that are greater than we think we can endure. — Ian Morgan Cron

You have deceived our trust, and made us doff our easy robes of peace, to crush our old limbs in ungentle steel. — Henry Bolingbroke

Thirty years ago, my sister, Gale (so named because a gale hit Boston Harbor the night she was born), some friends and I stole a boat in the middle of the night and sailed it out of the Santa Barbara harbor. Suddenly we were becalmed and the current began pushing us toward the breakwall. With no running lights and no power, we were dead in the water. Out of that darkness a steel hull appeared: it was the local Coast Guard cutter. My father, stern-faced and displeased, stood in the bow. — Gretel Ehrlich

You are strong, tempered like steel in the fire and by the blows of the hammer of life. Nothing will break you again, only make you stronger and more whole. Perfection is the pride of those who have not lived, who know not these things in their arrogance. They remain the same - raw and without form. The hammer never touches them, and they lie on the shelf, gathering dust, slowly tarnishing and fading and crumbling. the blows of the hammer in the fire refine us into bright shining glory for the roles we play in life - until we are one with the anvil, becoming immune to the hammer's little knocks, and smile at it. — Christina Engela

There was too much opinion in this country, too many sob stories. Nobody wanted to put a lid on anything; everyone wanted to say it all, about everything. If you as much as said hello to someone on a train or a plane, you were in for the unexpurgated memoirs. Nehru in 1947 had declared us a nation finding utterance - but in fifty years the utterance had become a mad clamour, a crazed babble, an unending howl. We were a nation of Scheherzades, afraid we'd die if, for a moment, we shut up. For myself, I'd mastered a face of steel, and an inscrutable nod. It did not always shut everyone up, but it did to some extent dam the ghastly flow. — Tarun J. Tejpal

The world is changing," said Nikolai, the steel edge emerging in his voice. "We change with it, or there will be nothing to remember us but dust. — Leigh Bardugo

And I wonder, in my last moments, if the planet does not mind that we wound her surface or pillage her bounty, because she knows we silly warm things are not even a breath in her cosmic life. We have grown and spread, and will rage and die. And when all that remains of us is our steel monuments and plastic idols, her winds will whisper, her sands will shift, and she will spin on and on, forgetting about the bold, hairless apes who thought they deserved immortality. — Pierce Brown

We really want to thank everyone for their kindness and generosity, even those who aren't helping us directly. — Mark Steel

These modern analysts! They charge so much. In my day, for five marks Freud himself would treat you. For ten marks, he would treat you and press your pants. For fifteen marks, Freud would let you treat him, and that included a choice of any two vegetables. Thirty dollars an hour! Fifty dollars an hour! The Kaiser only got twelve and a quarter for being Kaiser! And he had to walk to work! And the length of treatment! Two years! Five years! If one of us couldn't cure a patient in six months we would refund his money, take him to any musical revue and he would receive either a mahogany fruit bowl or a set of stainless steel carving knives. I remember you could always tell the patients Jung failed with, as he would give them large stuffed pandas. — Woody Allen

Look at Christ on the cross. Think of the challenge that must have been for Him. The agony of betrayal by people He had trusted, and death. And afterward came the resurrection. He proved that no challenge, no matter how great, could end His love for us. — Danielle Steel

We're all given terrible trials sometimes, things that we think will break our spirit and kill us, and they make us stronger in the end. They seem like the cruelest blows, but in a funny way they're like compliments from God. — Danielle Steel

The gods made the earth for all men t' share. Only when the kings come with their crowns and steel swords, they claimed it was all theirs. "My trees," they said, "you can't eat them apples. My stream, you can't fish here. My wood, you're not t' hunt. My earth, my water, my castle, my daughter, keep your hands away or I'll chop 'em off, but maybe if you kneel t' me I'll let you have a sniff." You call us thieves, but at least a thief has t' be brave and clever and quick. A kneeler only has t' kneel. — George R R Martin

Let us summarize these three points more concisely:

(a) The rejection of art as a mere emotional, individualistic, and romantic affair.
(b) "Objective" work, undertaken with the silent hope that the end product will nevertheless eventually be regarded as a work of art.
(c) Consciously goal-directed work in architecture, which will have a concise artistic effect on the basis of well-preparated objective-scientific criteria.

Such an architecture will actively raise the general standard of living. This represents the dialectic of our development process, which purports to arrive at the affirmative by negation - a process similar to melting down old iron and forging it into new steel. — El Lissitzky

With soul of flame and temper of steel we must act as our coolest judgment bids us. — Theodore Roosevelt

May the words come easy, the doubt be weak, and the coffee strong enough to eat through steel. (I don't drink coffee...but I understand most authors do, and they like it with a bit of fight in it.) Now, let us boot up, sit down, and accrue those daily page counts! — G. Allen Cook

My dear fellow citizens: For forty years you have heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many millions of tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you. — Vaclav Havel

You had help. He made you sick, or think you were, so he could control you. What does it say in the Bible, something about you'll get back the years the locust hath eaten? That's true for both of us. We lost a lot, but look what we have now. — Danielle Steel

He wakes! The steel giant wakes! Long, long ago he rose from the sea, with the blood of life streaming from his belly. And then they buried him with thunder ... and ... carrots ... at Stonehenge. But now he wakes again. The Age of Rotten Fish is over; the Age of Steel and Bombs is upon us. And he had come to give us life and strength, to free us form these cells, to restore us once again to baseball and ping pong! Sent by God from the Great Beyond!!! — Ryu Murakami

Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a grey day a "colourless" day. Grey is a colour, and can be a very powerful and pleasing colour ... A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun; so is a green tree, if it comes to that. But the grey umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style and shape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, and another grey like dove's plumage. One may seem grey like the deathly frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel. — Nick Flynn

We match each other stroke for stroke until I get a hit on her right arm.

She tries to switch sword arms, but I jab my scim at her wrist faster than she can parry. Her scim goes flying, and I tackle her. Her white-blonde hair tumbles free of her bun.

"Surrender!" I pin her down at the wrists, but she trashes and rips one arm free, scrabbling for a dagger at her waist. Steel stabs at my ribs, and seconds later, I am on my back with a blade at my throat.

"Ha!" She leans down, her hair falling around us like a shimmering silver curtain. — Sabaa Tahir

As the flint contains the spark, unknown to itself, which the steel alone can awaken to life, so adversity often reveals to us hidden gems, which prosperity or negligence would forever have hidden. — Josh Billings

And would I be able to forgive him or myself if it crossed the mark? I loved this man and all of his flaws. I knew that he wasn't perfect. He was human, and had secrets that would make stronger women than me flee. But that was the beauty of love. It made us stronger. It gave us hearts of steel and guts of iron. I had a shield around me that could withstand a war for this man. I had a passion that could overcome mountains. My love for Xavier burned in my soul and ran through my veins, and I was willing to take this chance. I needed to show him that I could be there for him. — J.S. Cooper

The second industrial revolution doesn't present us, as the first did, with overwhelming images of rolling mills or molten steel, but rather with bits of information that flow, as electrical impulses, through circuits. We still have machines made of steel, but they now obey bits that are weightless. — Italo Calvino

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. — David Brin

I had learned firsthand that tragedy and disappointment can strike any of us at any time. — Danielle Steel

[P]erhaps the burrows in which our lives were spent really were dark and dirty, and perhaps we ourselves were well suited to these burrows, but in the blue sky above our heads, up among the thinly scattered stars, there were special, artificial points of gleaming light, creeping unhurriedly through the constellations, points created here out of steel, semiconductors, and electricity, and now flying through space. And every one of us, even the blue-faced alcoholic we had passed on the way here, huddling like a toad in a snowdrift, even Mitiok's brother, and of course Mitiok and I - we all had our own little embassy up there in the cold pure blueness. — Victor Pelevin

We make our worlds of stranger stuff: We choose people who do not annoy us, places of green or glass and steel that feel as alive and necessary as our brothers and sisters, houses in which everything has a place, rules such as Do Not Take Things That Aren't Yours Unless No One Is Looking and Good Things Happen to Good People and A Year Is 365 Days are agreed upon, even when they aren't true, perhaps especially so. — Catherynne M Valente

I shared with Fleur the mysterious self-contempt of the survivor. There were times we hated who we were, and who we had to become, in order not to follow those we loved into the next world. We grew hard. We became impenetrable, sparing of our pity. Sorrows that leveled other people were small to us. We made no move to avoid pain. Sometimes we even welcomed it--we were clumsy with knives, fire, boiling water, steel traps. Pain took our minds off the greater pain that was the mistake that we still existed. — Louise Erdrich

Thousands of mosquitoes had already bitten all of us on chest and arms and ankles. Then a bright idea came to me: I jumped up on the steel roof of the car and stretched out flat on my back. Still there was no breeze, but the steel had an element of coolness in it and dried my back of sweat, clotting up thousands of dead bugs into cakes on my skin, and I realized the jungle takes you over and you become it. — Jack Kerouac

Came Honker's trip to Slice City along about then: our sax-man got a neck all full of the sharpest kind of steel. So we were out one horn. And you could tell: we played a little bit too rough, and the head-arrangements Collins and His Crew grew up to, they needed Honker's grease in the worst way. But we'd been together for five years or more, and a new man just didn't play somehow. We were this one solid thing, like a unit, and somebody had cut off a piece of us and we couldn't grow the piece back so we just tried to get along anyway, bleeding every night, bleeding from that wound. ("Black Country") — Charles Beaumont

Sorrow itself is not so hard to bear As the thought of sorrow coming. Airy ghosts, That work no harm, do terrify us more Than men in steel with bloody purposes. Death is not dreadful; 'tis the dread of death - We die whene'er we think of it! — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I was only one person among many. None of us made a difference individually, but together we all did." It was the true meaning of community. — Danielle Steel

In the palace, during my imprisonment, I learned that Maven had been made by his mother, formed into the monster he became. There is nothing on earth that can change him or what she did. But Cal was made too. All of us were made by someone else, and all of us have some thread of steel that nothing and no one can cut. — Victoria Aveyard

For one ... If you shoot me and your boss realizes it was without good reason, you'll have fucked up your trial period. And trust me; I know you're still in it." Ian pulled open a drawer in a small brown cabinet.
"Secondly, it could end very badly for me and I'd rather prevent that. Getting shot is not on my list of things to do today." He wrapped his hand around the steel grip of his own weapon and removed it from the drawer.
"And last but not least, if you plan to shoot me ... Well, it'll be a matter of which of us is quicker and has better aim." A pleasant smile crossed his features and he casually waved the gun from side to side. "Do you want to risk it? — Natasha McNeely

Do you love her?" I ask hoarsely.
His head whirls toward me. "No."
"You sure about that?"
"I don't. Not the way you do."
I relax, just slightly. "Still. You care about her."
Of course he does. We all do, because that girl flew into our house like a whirlwind and made everything come alive again. She brought steel and fire. She made us laugh again. She gave us a purpose - at first, it was us uniting against her. Then it turned into us standing beside her. Protecting her. Loving her. — Erin Watt

I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure - like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel - can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns within us. — Michel Leiris

To change our national economic story from one of financial speculation to one of future growth, we need a third industrial revolution: a green revolution. It will transform our economy as surely as the shift from iron to steel, from steam to oil. It will lead us toward a low-carbon future, with cleaner energy and greener growth. With an economy that is built to last - on more sustainable, more stable foundations — Chris Huhne

What do you have in this car?" he asked.
"What do you mean, like weapons?"
"That would be a good start."
"Well, I 've got a mini Swiss Army Knife on my key chain."
"A two-inch stainless steel blade and a nail file. They might as well surrender to us now ... — Richard Castle

We need to think long and hard about sanity, a word most of us cling to with a steel grip. Does fear of being regarded by others as insane confine me in a cage of "responsible" behavior that limits my freedom and cripples my ability to love? And is it in fact such a wonderful thing to be regarded as sane? After all, the chief administrator of the Holocaust, Adolph Eichmann, was declared "quite sane" by the psychiatrists who examined him before his trial in Jerusalem. Surely the same psychiatrists would have found Saint Basil, Saint Theodore and Saint Xenia all insane - and Saint Francis, and that most revered of all mad men, the Son of Man, the Savior, Jesus of Nazareth. — Jim Forest

Our steel-tipped step-ladder arrows will let us rescue that injured stork that settled down on top of the obelisk and can't fly away! — Robert Bernstein

Nothing is forever, but there's a continuing stream of people who go through our lives and continue with us ... Nothing just stops and stays ... But it flows on ... Like a river ... — Danielle Steel

Our gazes struck like flint and steel. And I realized that gunsmoke smell wasn't ozone. It was us. We burned. — Leah Raeder

Back in the twentieth century, we thought that robots would have taken over by this time, and, in a way, they have. But robots as a race have proved disappointing. Instead of getting to boss around underlings made of steel and plastic with circuitry and blinking lights and tank treads, like Rosie the maid on The Jetsons, we humans have outfitted ourselves with robotic external organs. Our iPods dictate what we listen to next, gadgets in our cars tell us which way to go, and smartphones finish our sentences for us. We have become our own robots. — Mary Norris

What evil?" He laughed. "What gods?" "The gods who made us all." "All?" he mocked. "Tell me, little bird, what kind of god makes a monster like the Imp, or a halfwit like Lady Tanda's daughter? If there are gods, they made sheep so wolves could eat mutton, and they made the weak for the strong to play with." "True knights protect the weak." He snorted. "There are no true knights, no more than there are gods. If you can't protect yourself, die and get out of the way of those who can. Sharp steel and strong arms rule this world, don't ever believe any different. — George R R Martin

When everything else is gone, balls are all any of us really have left. The question is: are yours made of flesh and blood, or steel? — Karen Marie Moning

Nobody that has seen a baby born can believe in god for a second. When you see your child born, and the panic, and the amount of technology that is saving the life of the two people you love most in the world, when you see how much stainless steel and money it takes to fight off the fact that god wants both those people dead, no one, no one can look into the eyes of a newborn baby and say there's a god, because I'll tell ya, if we were squatting in the woods, the two people I love most would be dead. There's just no way around that. If I were in charge, no way. We need technology to fight against nature; nature so wants us dead. Nature is trying to kill us. — Penn Jillette

Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books. — Hans Rosling

It's like some people just come through our lives to bring us something, a gift, a blessing, a lesson we need to learn, and that's why they're here ... — Danielle Steel

Pape called Basil his sanctuary. In truth we all exist in our own sanctuaries-but I don't mean cathedrals or prisons. I'm talking about our hearts and minds, which imprison us in anxiety, dear, insecurity, anger and other forms of misery. The walls & bars that keep most in a constant state of suffering are thoughts and emotions, not concrete & steel. It's a disease. Insanity. Most are afflicted by it, regardless of which side of the law they find themselves on or where they lay their heads at night. To be free of this, Renee, is to be free indeed. — Ted Dekker