Welter Quotes & Sayings

Amid the welter of vague political abstractions ... where meanings shift so quickly and so subtly, not only following changes of thought, but often manipulated artificially by political practitioners so as to obscure, expand, or distort ... a certain broad consistency in its relations to other kindred terms is the nearest approach to definition which such a term as Imperialism admits. Nationalism, internationalism, colonialism, its three closest congeners, are equally elusive, equally shifty, and the changeful overlapping of all four demands the closest vigilance. — J. Allan Hobson

It comforted her, in the confused unhappy welter of her emotions, to see the mountains always tranquil, remote, in their lonely splendour; untouchable, serenely inviolate. It was an obscure comfort to her to know that man's hectic world wasn't the only one - that there were others, where agitation and passion and bewilderment had no place. When her love turned into a chaotic fever-dream, in which she was tossing, hallucinated, frightened and miserable, she had longed to escape to the cold, austere, changeless beauty and peace of the snow. — Anna Kavan

In all this welter of women I still hadn't got one for myself, not that I was trying too hard, but sometimes I felt lonely to see everybody paired off and having a good time and all I did was curl up in my sleeping bag in the rosebushes and sigh and say bah. For me it was just red wine in my mouth and a pile of firewood — Jack Kerouac

The Planet On The Table
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.
Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.
His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.
It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part. — Wallace Stevens

I confess I prefer to engage with pictures which I've chosen myself out of the welter of unidentified pictures, without the intrusion of too much personal context - Ilike to be a detective, and dislike being an impresario. — Luc Sante

Editors keep pushing
deadline strain while people sleep
on benches and subway grates;
a welter weight boxer dances
on the platform at 125th Street
station, commuters look unfazed... — Kristen Henderson

Out of the welter of rapture and anger and heartbreak and hurt pride that he had left, depression emerged to sit upon her shoulder like a carrion crow. — Margaret Mitchell

I was trying to have an insight, and all I could think of was that I'd backed myself into a corner, and the corner was me. — John Welter

The pyre was a ditch 50 yards long, six yards wide and three yards deep, a welter of burning bodies. SS soldiers, stationed at five-yard intervals along the pathway side of the ditch, awaited their victims. They were holding small caliber arms - six millimeters - used in the KZ for administering a bullet in the back of the neck. At the end of the pathway two Sonderkommando men seized the victims by the arms and dragged them for 15 or 20 yards into position before the SS. Their cries of terror covered the sound of the shots. A shot, then, immediately afterwards, even before he was dead, the victim was hurled into the flames. — Miklos Nyiszli

I was too miserable to take much consolation just from feeling good for a moment in a welter of shudders and salted, bloodstained tears. — Anne Rice

A moral cynicism was sapping the strength of our society, half-lies were not only condoned, but regarded as smart. Many had remained untouched by the welter of the holocaust of battle fields, mass bombings, prison camps, the blood, pain, heartbreak and death remained to tally beyond their comprehension. Ghost of Bataan Speaks — Abie Abraham

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that. — Adam Gopnik

How deep is the weatherfront of time
that advances, roaring and calm
unendingly between was and will be?
A millisecond? A few hours? All secular life
worldwide, all consequences of past life
travel in it.
(from 'The Welter') — Les Murray

Out of the welter of life, a few people are selected for us by the accident of temporary confinement in the same circle. We never would have chosen these neighbors; life chose them for us. But thrown together on this island of living, we stretch to understand each other and are invigorated by the stretching. The difficulty with big city environment is that if we select - and we must in order to live and breathe and work in such crowded conditions - we tend to select people like ourselves, a very monotonous diet. All hors d'oeuvres and no meat; or all sweets and no vegetables, depending on the kind of people we are. But however much the diet may differ between us, one thing is fairly certain: we usually select the known, seldom the strange. We tend not to choose the unknown which might be a shock or a disappointment or simply a little difficult to cope with. And yet it is the unknown with all its disappointments and surprises that is the most enriching. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Take Marcus Aurelius! That's right! What did that old bugger do? In very similar situations! Harassed! Maligned! Transduced! On the brink of succumbing under the welter if abject plots ... of murderous perfidies! ... He withdrew, Ferdinand! ... He abandoned the steps of the Forum to the jackals! Yes! In solitude! In exile! That's where he sought his balm! That's where he found new courage! ... That's right! ... He took counsel on himself! And no one else! ... He didn't ask the mad dogs for their opinion! ... No! Faugh! ... Ah, despicable recantation! ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Why can't you like me?" he said, his voice breaking. His scent steamed then, hot and heady with a welter of contradictions: apples and fire and electric roil of those cold, black shadows. "Why can't you like me just a little?"
She would never know how she might have answered, because he never gave her the chance.
Instead, he kissed her. — Ilsa J. Bick

YOUNG MORTIMER:
Thou proud disturber of thy country's peace,
Corrupter of thy king, cause of these broils,
Base flatterer, yield! and were it not for shame,
Shame and dishonour to a soldier's name,
Upon my weapon's point here should'st thou fall,
And welter in thy gore.
LANCASTER:
Monster of men!
That, like the Greekish strumpet, train'd to arms
And bloody wars so many valiant knights;
Look for no other fortune, wretch, than death!
King Edward is not here to buckler thee. — Christopher Marlowe

It has always seemed to me that one of the more deplorable aspects of dying, aside from the terror, pain and filth, is the fact that when I am gone there will be no one here to register the world in just the way that I do. Don't misunderstand me. I have no illusions about my significance in the torrid scheme of things. Others will register other versions of the world, countless billions of them, a welter of worlds particular each to each, but the one that I shall have made merely by my brief presence in it will be lost for ever. — John Banville

Marriage isn't a love affair. It isn't even a honeymoon. It's a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they've worked at anything in their lives before. If it's a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it does on getting better. I've seen it with my own mother and father. But a bad marriage can dissolve in a welter of resentment and acrimony. I've seen that, too, in my own miserable and disastrous attempt at making another person happy. And it's never one person's fault. It's the sum total of a thousand little irritations, disagreements, idiotic details that in a sound alliance would simply be disregarded, or forgotten in the healing act of making love. Divorce isn't a cure, it's a surgical operation, even if there are no children to consider. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Many a month of gloomy unconsciousness rolled over me, without date or notice. One thousand waves may welter over a sunk wreck, and be felt as one. — Charles Robert Maturin

It's not so much a case of having to pay attention to the news of the world as it is a case of knowing when to change our filters so that the important stuff comes in. — Bill Welter

You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without god. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials. — Annie Dillard

I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives. — Ray Bradbury

It took place in the midnight in the University's Great Hall, in a welter of incense, candlesticks, runic inscriptions and magic circles, none of which was strictly necessary but which made the wizards feel better. — Terry Pratchett

I have occupied this idle, empty winter with writing a story. It has been written to please myself, without thought of my own vanity or modesty, without regard for other people's feelings, without considering whether I shock or hurt the living, without scrupling to speak of the dead.

The world, I know, is changing. I am not indifferent to the revolution that has caught us in its mighty skirts, to the enormity of the flood that is threatening to submerge us. But what could I do? In the welter of the surrounding storm, I have taken refuge for a moment on this little raft, constructed with the salvage of my memory. I have tried to steer it into that calm haven of art in which I still believe. I have tried to avoid some of the rocks and sandbanks that guard its entrance.

[from the introduction] — Dorothy Bussy

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust. — Jennifer Birkett

Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welter-weight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to have to face over the breakfast table. Brainy, moreover. The sort of girl who reduces you to pulp with sixteen sets of tennis and a few rounds of golf and then comes down to dinner as fresh as a daisy, expecting you to take an intelligent interest in Freud. — P.G. Wodehouse

The family trees of Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer are everywhere so laden with figures of accomplishment that one might expect future generations to be burdened by it all. But the welter of wonderfulness that was their heritage seemed to have been a boon, one that buoyed them up so that each child seems not only to have stood on the shoulders of giants but also to have danced on them. — Eric Metaxas

None of this means anything. Anything of significance, that is. I am just amusing myself, musing, losing myself in a welter of words. For words in here are a form of luxury, of sensuousness, they are all we have been allowed to keep of the rich, wasteful world from which we are shut away. — John Banville

Town-planning," Geddes once wrote, "is not mere place-planning, nor even work-planning. If it is to be successful it must be folk-planning. This means that its task is . . . to find the right places for each sort of people; places where they will really flourish." These places, of course, are not really to be found, but have to be made. From his earliest designs for a botanical school garden and urban renewal work in Edinburgh to his latest building initiatives in Montpelier in southern France, Geddes pursued the creation of such places. He perceived himself as a gardener ordering the environment for the benefit of life. — Volker M. Welter

Let there be an end ... of all this welter of pity, which is only self-pity reflected onto some obvious surface. — D.H. Lawrence

You are the indispensable agent of change. You should not be daunted by the magnitude of the task before you. Your contribution can inspire others, embolden others who are timid, to stand up for the truth in the midst of a welter of distortion, propaganda, and deceit; stand up for human rights where these are being violated with impunity; stand up for justice, freedom, and love where they are trampled underfoot by injustice, oppression, hatred, and harsh cruelty; stand up for human dignity and decency at times when these are in desperately short supply. God calls on us to be his partners to work for a new kind of society where people count; where people matter more than things, more than possessions; where human life is not just respected but positively revered; where people will be secure and not suffer from the — Desmond Tutu

Archaeology is the study of humanity itself, and unless that attitude towards the subject is kept in mind archaeology will be overwhelmed by impossible theories or a welter of flint chips. — Margaret Murray

In the welter of statistics about selected ethnic origins (singular or multiple) in the last census, one finding was often overlooked. Of the 25,309,330 people living in Canada in 1986, only 69,065 declared themselves as Canadians. — Charlotte Gray

But he was wise enough even at twenty to see that what many would call an utter and admirable freedom was also a sort of thicket or wilderness, in which, by virtue of being able to take any path he chose, he was lost in a dense jungle of the possible, the sheer welter of which sometimes overwhelmed him. The irony was, he thought, that as soon as you chose a path, you mourned and regretted the ones that you did not choose; but to choose none was to moon uselessly over them all, and thus be imprisoned by impasse. How very many people, he thought as he walked through the catchbirdtrees by the lake, were frozen by the weight of their potential, the imposing alps of their dreams? — Brian Doyle

They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator's prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard's own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. — John Updike

It is surprising, in the welter of questions that one gets at (AGMs), how few actually relate to the performance of the company, or the decisions taken by the board in particular areas. — John Harvey-Jones

Civilization has imposed countless restrictions and conventions on each of us, with the result that the subconscious in the majority of us has become a storage room without a key. We are forced to suppress or forget so many events and ideas and thoughts that those to which we should have access are lost in the welter. However, there are people who seem capable of unlocking this part of their minds and extracting relevant information. — Margaret Millar

The river runs through the heart of the city, and braiding around and over and under the river, the city's rail system is a welter of tarnished silver ribbons. — Sarah Monette

They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines — Virginia Woolf

We shall be branded with the steel of clinging shame if we leave the Philippines to fall into a welter of bloody anarchy," he proclaimed, "instead of taking hold of them and governing them with righteousness and justice, in the interests of their own people even more than in the interests of ours. — Doris Kearns Goodwin