Wizened Quotes & Sayings

Is that the true, the supreme terror, to discover that I am the wizened youth whose cries no one can hear? — Roberto Bolano

A big man is always accused of gluttony, whereas a wizened or osseous man can eat like a refugee at every meal, and no one ever notices his greed. — Robertson Davies

What's going on here?" asked a deep voice at her elbow.

Anne turned to find her guardian standing beside her. He looked solidly masculine and incredibly competent to deal with the child's wizened master and even with the spectators to what had turned into a near spectacle. — Gayle Wilson

Disgust rose in Samantha like vomit. She wanted to seize the over-warm cluttered room and mash it between her hands, until the royal china, and the gas fire, and the gilt-framed pictures of Miles broke into jagged pieces; then, with wizened and painted Maureen trapped and squalling inside the wreckage, she wanted to heave it, like a celestial shot-putter, away into the sunset. The crushed lounge and doomed crone inside it, soared in her imagination through the heavens, plunging into the limitless ocean, leaving Samantha alone in the endless stillness of the universe. — J.K. Rowling

They failed at some important task and were banished to the heavens. The women themselves were wizened and toothless, or supple as polished ebony, with long-muscled limbs under pale shukas. I loved them and their tales, but I wanted more to join Kibii and the other totos who were becoming warriors, young morani. The role of girls in the village was entirely domestic. I had a different position - a rare one, free from the — Paula McLain

The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores. An — Neal Stephenson

We lied to ourselves thinking in our minds we knew everything. We were deceived in believing that youthful enthusiasm could replace wizened maturity. — Anna M. Aquino

ISCARIOT"

"A box of doves
I placed beside your chest
Liar
A stork of silk
With rubies in it's nest
Fire
Of my love
Will burn thee to a wizened word
For ere to go unheard.

A mare of wood
Elder, elm and oak
Liar
Will keep you fair
If you jest me no joke
Fire
Of my love
Will burn thee to a wizened word
For ere to go unheard.

I'm old and bruised
But my fate is that of youth
Liar
Trickster you
Be a grisly dragon's tooth
Fire
Of my love
Will burn thee to a wizened word
For ere to go unheard.

You gashed the heart of my heart
Like a Portuguese
Witch,
I'd planned for you this land
But you devoured my hand. — Marc Bolan

Wit was insulting each person as they stepped onto the island. "Brightness Marakal! What a
disaster that hairstyle is; how brave of you to show it to the world. Brightlord Marakal, I wish you'd
warned us you were going to attend; I'd have forgone supper. I do so hate being sick after a full meal.
Brightlord Cadilar! How good it is to see you. Your face reminds me of someone dear to me."
"Really?" wizened Cadilar said, hesitating.
"Yes," Wit said, waving him on, "my horse. Ah, Brightlord Neteb, you smell unique today - did you
attack a wet whitespine, or did one just sneeze on you? Lady Alami! No, please, don't speak - it's much
easier to maintain my illusions regarding your intelligence that way. And Brightlord Dalinar." Wit nodded
to Dalinar as he passed. "Ah, my dear Brightlord Taselin. Still engaged in your experiment to prove a
maximum threshold of human idiocy? Good for you! Very empirical of you. — Brandon Sanderson

Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce. — Neil Gaiman

Imagine the wizened quality of a life blanched of contradiction and double standard.
p 44 — Michael Perry

Clavain looked around the room, taking in the gruesome menagerie of wraithlike seniors, wizened elders and obscene glass-bottled end-state Conjoiners. They were all hanging on his answer, even the visible brains seeming to hesitate in their wheezing pulsations. — Alastair Reynolds

[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry. — Roberto Bolano

I sensed the presence of wizened bachelor potters working in sheds behind their mothers' houses. — Walter Kirn

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow,
My tears like vinegar,
Or the bitter blinking yellow
Of an acetic star.
Tonight the caustic wind, love,
Gossips late and soon,
And I wear the wry-faced pucker of
The sour lemon moon.
While like an early summer plum,
Puny, green, and tart,
Droops upon its wizened stem
My lean, unripened heart. — Sylvia Plath

An indescribable sadness emanated from the white splendour of the staircase and balustrade; the blood-red, now almost black splendour of the carpets. The huge palms in their huge pots looked like they had recently arrived from the cemetery. Their dark green leaves also looked blackish, like wizened, perished weapons from olden days. — Joseph Roth

I wanted Yoda to be the traditional kind of character you find in fairy tales and mythology. And that character is usually a frog or a wizened old man on the side of the road. The hero is going down the road and meets this poor and insignificant person. The goal or lesson is for the hero to learn to respect everybody and to pay attention to the poorest person because that's where the key to his success will be. — George Lucas

And so all of these thoughts overwhelmed me when I woke from my hiding place in an alley the next morning, having slept on garbage and filth, to find it - wearing a large gray hat, small as a child but with the wizened features of something already dead - staring down at me. — Jeff VanderMeer

I cannot actually see him, but there he is in my mind's eye, crouching or down on all fours, on a hillock, black clouds racing past over his head, and the hillock becomes a hill and the next minute it is the atrium of a church, an atrium as black as the clouds, charged with electricity like the clouds, and glistening with moisture or blood, and the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry. The curfew was in force. — Roberto Bolano

As the last dish of confections was removed a weird pageant swept across the further end of the banqueting-room: Oberon and Titania with Robin Goodfellow and the rest, attired in silks and satins gorgeous of hue, and bedizened with such late flowers as were still with us. I leaned forward to commend, and saw that each face was brown and wizened and thin-haired: so that their motions and their wedding paean felt goblin and discomforting; nor could I smile till they departed by the further door.
("The Basilisk") — R. Murray Gilchrist

Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute? On the other hand, who would be so incurious as to leave unexamined the influence and motives of a woman who once boasted of operating more than five hundred convents in upward of 105 countries - "without counting India"? Lone self-sacrificing zealot, or chair of a missionary multinational? The scale alters with the perspective, and the perspective alters with the scale. — Christopher Hitchens

He waved irritably at a waiter. There was a small bar in a dark corner of the room, where an old, wizened bartender stood for long stretches of time without moving. When called upon, he moved with contemptuous slowness. His job was that of servant to men's relaxation and pleasure, but his manner was that of an embittered quack ministering to some guilty disease. — Ayn Rand

She looked at a silver birch: it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty, old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his fact and hands, with hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah!
she would be the best of all. She would be a gracious goddess, smooth and stately, the Lady of the Wood. — C.S. Lewis

As he got older, Billy suspected, he would, Dicaprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizened child. — China Mieville

Wizened and white, with brown blotched on her face the size and complexity of unshelled peanuts, Midge had a jitter in her head that made her pew like a chicken trying to make up its mind what to peck. — John Irving

One Monday, just for sport, Charlie grabbed an eggplant that a spectacularly wizened granny was going for, but instead of twisting it out of his hand with some mystic kung fu move as he expected, she looked him in the eye and shook her head - just a jog, barely perceptible really - it might have been a tic, but it was the most eloquent of gestures. Charlie read it as saying: O White Devil, you do not want to purloin that purple fruit, for I have four thousand years of ancestors and civilization on you; my grandparents built the railroads and dug the silver mines, and my parents survived the earthquake, the fire, and a society that outlawed even being Chinese; I am mother to a dozen, grandmother to a hundred, and great-grandmother to a legion; I have birthed babies and washed the dead; I am history and suffering and wisdom; I am a Buddha and a dragon; so get your fucking hand off my eggplant before you lose it. — Christopher Moore

There's never been a safer time to go for a ride. Sadly, though, there's a problem. You see, cycling is seen now not as something that might be exhilarating or even useful but as a frontline propaganda weapon in the war on capitalism, banking, freedom, McDonald's, injustice, Swiss drug companies, rape and progress. Every morning London is chock-full of little individually wrapped Twiglets, their wizened faces contorted with hatred for all that they see. Fat people. Cars. Chain stores. It's all fascism. Fascism, d'you hear? From what they see as the moral high ground, they sneer at pedestrians, howl at buses, bang on cars, scream at taxi drivers and charge through every convention that defines society with their walnutty bottoms in the air and their stupid legs going nineteen to the dozen. — Jeremy Clarkson