Dull Knife Quotes

Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.

You travel with a whetstone on your arm? (Kiara) You don’t ever want to kill someone with a dull knife. It takes too long to sever their arteries, or puncture organs, and it makes it even messier than normal. (Nykyrian)

(Henry requests Sin marry Caledonia) I would sooner geld myself. Drunk. With a dull knife. (Sin)

It’s the dull knife that cuts you.

Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight; indecision, a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it.

What does nostalgia mean to a child? An abstraction. A standing stone waiting for them in the mist. Walk a path across some decades, any path you like, and the word will gather weight. It will come to you trailing maybes and might-have-beens. Nostalgia is a drug, a knife. Against young skin it carries a dull edge, but time will teach you that nostalgia cuts - and that it's a blade that we cannot keep from applying to our own flesh.

I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams of childhood trauma—that becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force—a force so great the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking (and after two or three of these gargantuan swipes it may succeed in breaking itself…which may be what happened to such disparate writers as Ross Lockridge and Robert E. Howard). Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. No writer, painter, or actor—no artist—is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is “genius”), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.

Loss is a knife, constantly cutting, but over time the blade dulls, and the cuts aren't as sharp. It's always there in the drawer, but you realize it doesn't cut as deeply anymore.

I miss you, Logan." I touched my fingers to my lips, then to the forehead of the Keeley Brothers skull. "I miss you so much." Missing Logan was an emptiness, an ache so dull and deep, it was a permanent part of me. I would never truly get over his death, but someday I would find peace. Missing Zachary, on the other hand, was a searing knife in the gut. I burned to save him from the horrible fates I imagined, and the need to be in his arms again set my skin ablaze. One boy was gone forever. The other was gone now.

I have been mostly dull lately. Like a butter knife. And hoping to find, when called upon, something more in my arsenal than a butter knife. Unless my opponent is actually butter. Then that would be fine. Room temperature butter.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?"—was that it?—"I prefer men to cauliflowers"—was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like this about cabbages.

It's ridiculous. Here I sit in my little room, I, Brigge, who have got to be twenty-eight years old and about whom no one knows. I sit here and am nothing. And yet this nothing begins to think and thinks, up five flights of stairs, these thoughts on a gray Paris afternoon: Is it possible, this nothing thinks, that one has not yet seen, recognized, and said anything real and important? Is it possible that one has had thousands of years of time to look, reflect, and write down, and that one has let the millennia pass away like a school recess in which one eats one's sandwich and an apple? Yes, it is possible. ...Is it possible that in spite of inventions and progress, in spite of culture, religion, and worldly wisdom, that one has remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that one has even covered this surface, which would at least have been something, with an incredibly dull slipcover, so that it looks like living-room furniture during the summer vacation? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false because one has always spoken of its masses, as if one was telling about a coming together of many people, instead of telling about the one person they were standing around, because he was alien and died? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that one believed one has to make up for everything that happened before one was born? Is it possible one would have to remind every single person that he arose from all earlier people so that he would know it, and not let himself be talked out of it by the others, who see it differently? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that all these people know very precisely a past that never was? Is it possible that everything real is nothing to them; that their life takes its course, connected to nothing, like a clock in an empty room? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that one knows nothing about girls, who are nevertheless alive? Is it possible that one says "the women", "the children", "the boys", and doesn't suspect (in spite of all one's education doesn't suspect) that for the longest time these words have no longer had a plural, but only innumerable singulars? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and think it is something they have in common? Just look at two schoolboys: one buys himself a knife, and the same day his neighbor buys one just like it. And after a week they show each other their knives and it turns out that they bear only the remotest resemblance to each other-so differently have they developed in different hands (Well, the mother of one of them says, if you boys always have to wear everything out right away). Ah, so: is it possible to believe that one could have a God without using him? Yes, it is possible. But, if all this is possible, has even an appearance of possibility-then for heaven's sake something has to happen. The first person who comes along, the one who has had this disquieting thought, must begin to accomplish some of what has been missed; even if he is just anyone, not the most suitable person: there is simply no one else there. This young, irrelevant foreigner, Brigge, will have to sit himself down five flights up and write, day and night, he will just have to write, and that will be that.

My hand trembles with the need to curl a knife in my fist and plunge it deep into someone’s throat. I long to hear the gurgling as they choke on their blood. Their dull eyes, wide with fear. I can almost see their lives flashing in their dilated irises.

A mind is only as sharp as the knife, that strives to cut through thoughts too tough for the blade, before it breaks or goes dull.

Her gut ached, as if love was being dug out of her with a dull knife.

Just this morning I’d been afraid that I might never meet the young man who loved her so. Now I feared if I ever did meet him, I would cut out his heart with a dull knife and feed it to the gulls. Finally,

Stalin’s policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.

I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams or childhood trauma- that becoming a writer is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force- a force so great that the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking.

Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby Edgy and dull, and cut a six-inch valley Through the middle of my skull.” - Bruce Springsteen, “I’m on Fire

I am like the pencil I constantly sharpen with a knife; I am just a dull nub of the person I was.

My mind had no answers. It was limp and dulled, useless as my missing fingers. One thought came clear: I must do something. I could not stand by while a horror was loosed upon the world. I had the thought that I should find my sister’s workroom. Perhaps there would be something there to help me, some antidote, some great drug of reversal. It was not far, a hall off her bedchamber separated by a curtain. I had never seen another witch’s craft room before, and I walked its shelves expecting I do not know what, a hundred grisly things, kraken livers, dragons’ teeth, the flayed skin of giants. But all I saw were herbs, and rudimentary ones at that: poisons, poppies, a few healing roots. I had no doubt my sister could work plenty with them, for her will had always been strong. But she was lazy, and here was the proof. Those few simples were old and weak as dead leaves. They had been collected haphazardly, some in bud, some already withered, cut with any knife at any time of day. I understood something then. My sister might be twice the goddess I was, but I was twice the witch. Her crumbling trash could not help me. And my own herbs from Aiaia would not be enough, strong as they were. The monster was bound to Crete, and whatever would be done, Crete must guide me.

Nostalgia is a drug, a knife. Against young skin it carries a dull edge, but time will teach you that nostalgia cuts—and that it’s a blade we cannot keep from applying to our own flesh.

And now, Picker and the others are watching Mallet. Every moment, someone’s hovering close. The healer might try to fall on his knife at any time … given the chance. Ah, Mallet, he kept pushing you away. ‘Another time, I’ve too much on my mind right now. Nothing more than a dull ache. When this is done, we’ll get to it, then.’ It wasn’t your fault, Mallet. Soldiers die.

Before us stretched a corridor of meat, great torsos of meadow animals strung in glistening flayed exhibitions, heads with limp exhausted comic-book tongues dangling at too sharp an angle, heads with dull-eyed slaughter-greeting looks, heads smiling and winking, perhaps the subtlest camouflage this severed coyness, heads piled in pyramids like park cannonballs, some of them cruelly facing a sausage display of their missing extremities, a thick and thin suspended rain of sausages, a storm of jellied blood, and further down the corridor no recognizable animal shapes but chunks of their bodies, shaped not by hide or muscle but by cleaver, knife and appetite.

In the wake of the Patriot Act, during the second administration of George W., you made a series of small, handheld weapons. The rule was that each weapon had to be assembled from household items within minutes. You’d been gay-bashed before, two black eyes while waiting in line for a burrito (you ran after him, of course). Now you thought, if the government comes for its citizens, we should be prepared, even if our weapons are pathetic. Your art-weapons included a steak knife affixed to a bottle of ranch dressing and mounted on an axe handle, a dirty sock sprouting nails, a wooden stump with a clump of urethane resin stuck to one end with dull bolts protruding from it, and more.

Hope is reactionary: it cocoons actuality in the gossamer of the tolerable, dulling the thirst for change. Despair is revolutionary: it grinds the knife-edge of the intolerable against the whetstone of actuality, sparking the will to change. Whoever tolerates the present will never risk everything to change it. Only those who realize they have no future left to lose will be willing to stake everything on the total transformation of the present; a transformation in which every envisageable future is abolished, the better to invite the facelessness of what will come. The only appropriate mode of thinking for a culture on the edge of extinction is the thinking that stimulates pain.

They growled a response and went on digging. For some time there was no noise but the grating sound of the spades discharging their freight of mould and gravel. It was very monotonous. Finally a spade struck upon the coffin with a dull woody accent, and within another minute or two the men had hoisted it out on the ground. They pried off the lid with their shovels, got out the body and dumped it rudely on the ground. The moon drifted from behind the clouds and exposed the pallid face. The barrow was got ready and the corpse placed on it, covered with a blanket, and bound to its place with the rope. Potter took out a large spring-knife and cut off the dangling end of the rope and then said: “Now the cussed thing’s ready, Sawbones, and you’ll just out with another five, or here she stays.

I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams or childhood trauma- that becoming a writer is a direst result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force- a force so great that the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking.

Seven months later, June 18, 1941, as the first display of German bombing lit the Trachimbrod skies electric, as my grandfather had his first orgasm (his first and only pleasure, of which she was not the cause), she slit her wrist with a knife that had been made dull carving love letters.

fuck you. You’re right I’m banging the shit out of her. But it’s just about the sex. That’s what I am now. Someone who needs to fuck to feel alive.” But Vic wasn’t looking at him anymore. His gaze was frozen over Nikhil’s shoulder. He realized with a dull thud of horror that the sound of the water in the bathroom had stopped. He spun around. Jess looked like he had stabbed her in the gut with a blunt knife and then done it again, harder.

But if my father could stand up to schoolmasters and if he inherited some of his own father's gifts as a teacher, he himself could never have become one. He could teach and loved teaching. He could radiate enthusiasm, but he could never impose discipline. He could never have taught a dull subject to a dull boy, never have said: "Do this because I say so." Enthusiasm spread knowledge sideways, among equals. Discipline forced it downwards from above. My father's relationships were always between equals, however old or young, distinguished or undistinguished the other person. Once, when I was quite little, he came up to the nursery while I was having my lunch. And while he was talking I paused between mouthfuls, resting my hands on the table, knife and fork pointing upwards. "You oughtn't really to sit like that," he said, gently. "Why not?" I asked, surprised. "Well..." He hunted around for a reason he could give. Because it's considered bad manners? Because you mustn't? Because... "Well," he said, looking in the direction my fork was pointing, "Suppose somebody suddenly fell through the ceiling. They might land on your fork and that would be very painful." "I see," I said, though I didn't really. It seemed such an unlikely thing to happen, such a funny reason for holding your knife and fork flat when you were not using them... But funny reason or not, it seems I have remembered it. In the same sort of way I learned about the nesting habits of starlings. I had been given a bird book for Easter (Easter 1934: I still have the book) and with its help I had made my first discovery. "There's a blackbird's nest in the hole under the tiles just outside the drawing-room window," I announced proudly. "I've just seen the blackbird fly in." "I think it's probably really a starling," said my father. "No, it's a blackbird," I said firmly, hating to be wrong, hating being corrected. "Well," said my father, realizing how I felt but at the same time unable to allow an inaccuracy to get away with it, "Perhaps it's a blackbird visiting a starling." A blackbird visiting a starling. Someone falling through the ceiling. He could never bear to be dogmatic, never bring himself to say (in effect): This is so because I say it is, and I am older than you and must know better. How much easier, how much nicer to escape into the world of fantasy in which he felt himself so happily at home.

A conversation between Telemachus & Circe: "That is how things go. You fix them, and they go awry, and then you fix them again.” “You have a patient temper.” “My father called it dullness. Shearing, cleaning out the hearths, pitting olives. He wanted to know how to do such things for curiosity’s sake, but he did not want to actually have to do them.” It was true. Odysseus’ favorite task was the sort that only had to be performed once: raiding a town, defeating a monster, finding a way inside an impenetrable city. “Perhaps you get it from your mother.” He did not look up, but I thought I saw him tense. “How is she? I know you speak to her.” “She misses you.” “She knows where I am.” The anger stood out plain and clean on his face. There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line. No wonder his father had been so baffled by him. [Odysseus] would have been always looking for the hidden meaning, the knife in the dark. But Telemachus carried his blade in the open.

Afterward, I pretended to be patient as Akos taught me how to predict how strong a poison would be without tasting it. I tried to seal every moment in my memory. I needed to know how to brew these concoctions on my own, because soon he would be gone. If the renegades and I were caught in our attempt tonight, I would probably lose my life. If we succeeded, Akos would be home, and Shotet would be in chaos, without its leader. Either way, it was unlikely that I would see him again. “No, no,” Akos said. “Don’t hack at it--slice. Slice!” “I am slicing,” I said. “Maybe if your knives weren’t so dull--” “Dull? I could cut your fingertip off with this knife!” I spun the knife in my hand and caught it by the handle. “Oh? Could you?” He laughed, and put his arm across my shoulders. I felt my heartbeat in my throat. “Don’t pretend you’re not capable of delicacy; I’ve seen it myself.” I scowled, and tried to focus on “slicing.” My hands were trembling a little. “See me dancing in the training room and you think you know everything about me.” “I know enough. Look, slices! Told you so.” He lifted his arm, but kept his hand against my back, right under my shoulder blade. I carried the feeling with me for the rest of the night, as we finished the elixir and got ready for bed and he shut the door between us.

I would sooner geld myself. Drunk. With a dull knife." Sin spoke with a slow, deadly emphasis on each word. King Henry II stood a few feet away from him without the protection of a bodyguard or other courtier. They were alone in the throne room, and no doubt any other man would be cowering before his monarch. But Sin had never cowed in his life, and Henry knew better than to expect such behavior from him now. Henry's face hardened. "I could command it of you." Sin cocked one arrogant brow and asked, "Then why don't you?" Henry smiled at that, and the tension left his body as he closed the distance between them. Their friendship had been forged years ago, in the dark of night, and at the end of a blade pressed deep against Henry's throat. Sin had spared the king's life and since that day, Henry had treasured the only man who had never been awed by his power or authority. Sin answered to no man, be he king, pope, sultan or begger. But then, there was nothing in life that awed Sin. Nothing in life that commanded him, or touched him. He was completely alone. And he preferred it that way. "I didn't get this throne by being a fool, Sin. Should I command you to it, I know precisely what you'd do. You'd turn your back on me and head straight for yon door." Henry looked sincere. "God's truth, you are the only man alive I never wish to make my enemy. 'Tis why I ask this as a friend." "Damn you." -Sin & Henry

UNDERBELLY Wouldbelove, do not think of me as a whetstone until you hear the whole story: In it, I’m not the hero, but I’m not the villain either so let’s say, in the story, I was human and made of human-things: fear and hands, underbelly and blade. Let me say it plain: I loved someone and I failed at it. Let me say it another way: I like to call myself wound but I will answer to knife. Sometimes I think we have the same name, Notquitelove. I want to be soft, to say here is my underbelly and I want you to hold the knife, but I don’t know what I want you to do: plunge or mercy. I deserve both. I want to hold and be held. Let me say it again, Possiblelove: I’m not sure you should. The truth is: If you don’t, I won’t die of want or lonely, just time. And not now, not even soon. But that’s how every story ends eventually. Here is how one might start: Before. The truth? I’m not a liar but I close my eyes a lot, Couldbelove. Before, I let a blade slide itself sharp against me. Look at where I once bloomed red and pulsing. A keloid history. I have not forgotten the knife or that I loved it or what it was like before: my unscarred body visits me in dreams and photographs. Maybelove, I barely recognize it without the armor of its scars. I am trying to tell the truth: the dreams are how I haunt myself. Maybe I’m not telling the whole story: I loved someone and now I don’t. I can’t promise to leave you unscarred. The truth: I am a map of every blade I ever held. This is not a dream. Look at us now: all grit and density. What, Wouldbelove do you know of knives? Do you think you are a soft thing? I don’t. Maybe the truth is: Both. Blade and guard. My truth is: blade. My hands on the blade; my hands, the blade; my hands carving and re-carving every overzealous fibrous memory. The truth is: I want to hold your hands because they are like mine. Holding a knife by the blade and sharpening it. In your dreams, how much invitation to pierce are you? Perhapslove, the truth is: I am afraid we are both knives, both stones, both scarred. Or we will be. The truth is: I have made fire before: stone against stone. Mightbelove, I have sharpened this knife before: blade against blade. I have hurt and hungered before: flesh against flesh. I won’t make a dull promise.

["What They Want"] Vallejo writing about loneliness while starving to death; Van Gogh's ear rejected by a whore; Rimbaud running off to Africa to look for gold and finding an incurable case of syphilis; Beethoven gone deaf; Pound dragged through the streets in a cage; Chatterton taking rat poison; Hemingway's brains dropping into the orange juice; Pascal cutting his wrists in the bathtub; Artaud locked up with the mad; Dostoevsky stood up against a wall; Crane jumping into a boat propeller; Lorca shot in the road by Spanish troops; Berryman jumping off a bridge; Burroughs shooting his wife; Mailer knifing his. -that's what they want: a God damned show a lit billboard in the middle of hell. that's what they want, that bunch of dull inarticulate safe dreary admirers of carnivals.

How could one explain to him something of that breathless tension when the knife began the first cut and the narrow red trace followed the light pressure, when the body, under clips and forceps, opened up like a multiple curtain, when organs which had never seen the light were laid bare, when one followed a track like a hunter in a jungle and suddenly faced the huge wild beast, death, in destroyed tissues, in lumps, in tumors, in scissures—and the fight began, the silent, mad fight during which one could use no other weapon than a thin blade and a needle and a steady hand—how could one explain what it meant when then all at once a dark shadow rushed through the blinding white of stark concentration, a majestic derision that seemed to render the knife dull, the needle brittle, and the hand heavy—and when this invisible, enigmatic pulsing—life—then ebbed away under one’s powerless hands, collapsed, drawn into this ghostly vortex which one could never reach or hold—and when a face that had a moment ago breathed and borne a name turned into a rigid, nameless mask—this senseless, rebellious helplessness: how could one explain it—and what was there to explain? Ravic

I want to make people understand that boxing ourselves into tiny cubbies based on class, race, ethnicity, religion—anything, really—comes from a poverty of mind, a poverty of imagination. The world is dull and cruel when we isolate ourselves. Survival, true survival of the body and soul, requires creativity, freedom of thought, collaboration. You might have time and I might have land. You might have ideas and I might have strength. You might have a tomato and I might have a knife. We need each other. We need to say: I honor the things that you respect and I value the things you cherish. I am not better than you. You are not better than me. Nobody is better than anybody else. Nobody is who you think they are at first glance. We need to see beyond the projections we cast onto each other. Each of us is so much grander, more nuanced, and more extraordinary than anybody thinks, including ourselves. I’ve flown on private planes, I’ve lounged on private beaches. I’ve fallen asleep at night with no shelter, no parents, no country, no food. I’ve been made to feel worthless and disposable by the world. I’ve seen enough to know that you can be a human with a mountain of resources and you can be a human with nothing, and you can be a monster either way. Everywhere, and especially at both extremes, you can find monsters. It’s at the extremes that people are most scared—

They seemed so right together-both of them sophisticated, dark-haired, and striking; no doubt they had much in common, she thought a little dismally as she picked up her knife and fork and went to work on her lobster. Beside her, Lord Howard leaned close and teased, “It’s dead, you know.” Elizabeth glanced blankly at him, and he nodded to the lobster she was still sawing needlessly upon. “It’s dead,” he repeated. “There’s no need to try to kill it twice.” Mortified, Elizabeth smiled and sighed and thereafter made an all-out effort to ingratiate herself with the rest of the party at their table. As Lord Howard had forewarned the gentlemen, who by now had all seen or heard about her escapade in the card room, were noticeably cooler, and so Elizabeth tried ever harder to be her most engaging self. It was only the second time in her life she’d actually used the feminine wiles she was born with-the first time being her first encounter with Ian Thornton in the garden-and she was a little amazed by her easy success. One by one the men at the table unbent enough to talk and laugh with her. During that long, trying hour Elizabeth repeatedly had the strange feeling that Ian was watching her, and toward the end, when she could endure it no longer, she did glance at the place where he was seated. His narrowed amber eyes were leveled on her face, and Elizabeth couldn’t tell whether he disapproved of this flirtatious side of her or whether he was puzzled by it. “Would you permit me to offer to stand in for my cousin tomorrow,” Lord Howard said as the endless meal came to an end and the guests began to arise, “and escort you to the village?” It was the moment of reckoning, the moment when Elizabeth had to decide whether she was going to meet Ian at the cottage or not. Actually, there was no real decision to make, and she knew it. With a bright, artificial smile Elizabeth said, “Thank you.” “We’re to leave at half past ten, and I understand there are to be the usual entertainments-sopping and a late luncheon at the local inn, followed by a ride to enjoy the various prospects of the local countryside.” It sounded horribly dull to Elizabeth at that moment. “It sounds lovely,” she exclaimed with such fervor that Lord Howard shot her a startled look. “Are you feeling well?” he asked, his worried gaze taking in her flushed cheeks and overbright eyes. “I’ve never felt better,” she said, her mind on getting away-upstairs to the sanity and quiet of her bedchamber. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have the headache and should like to retire,” she said, leaving behind her a baffled Lord Howard. She was partway up the stairs before it dawned on her what she’d actually said. She stopped in midstep, then gave her head a shake and slowly continued on. She didn’t particularly care what Lord Howard-her fiance’s own cousin-thought. And she was too miserable to stop and consider how very odd that was.

remember the evening as a wonderful blur of warm emotion, tinged in bitter. Fiddles, lutes, and drums, everyone played and danced and sang as they wished. I dare say we rivaled any faerie revel you can bring to mind. I got presents. Trip gave me a belt knife with a leather grip, claiming that all boys should have something they can hurt themselves with. Shandi gave me a lovely cloak she had made, scattered with little pockets for a boy’s treasures. My parents gave me a lute, a beautiful thing of smooth dark wood. I had to play a song of course, and Ben sang with me. I slipped a little on the strings of the unfamiliar instrument, and Ben wandered off looking for notes once or twice, but it was nice. Ben opened up a small keg of mead he had been saving for “just such an occasion.” I remember it tasting the way I felt, sweet and bitter and sullen. Several people had collaborated to write “The Ballad of Ben, Brewer Supreme.” My father recited it as gravely as if it were the Modegan royal lineage while accompanying himself on a half harp. Everyone laughed until they hurt, and Ben twice as much as everyone else. At some point in the night, my mother swept me up and danced around in a great spinning circle. Her laughter sang out like music trailing in the wind. Her hair and skirt spun around me as she twirled. She smelled comforting, the way only mothers do. That smell, and the quick laughing kiss she gave me did more to ease the dull ache of Ben’s leaving than all the entertainments combined.

The unhappy priest was breathing hard; sincere horror at the foreseen dispersal of Church property was linked with regret at his having lost control of himself again, with fear of offending the Prince, whom he genuinely liked and whose blustering rages as well as disinterested kindness he knew well. So he sat down warily, glancing every now and again at Don Fabrizio, who had taken up a little brush and was cleaning the knobs of a telescope, apparently absorbed. A little later he got up and cleaned his hands thoroughly with a rag; his face was quite expressionless, his light eyes seemed intent only on finding any remaining stain of oil in the cuticles of his nails. Down below, around the villa, all was luminous and grandiose silence, emphasised rather than disturbed by the distant barking of Bendicò baiting the gardener’s dog at the far end of the lemon-grove, and by the dull rhythmic beat from the kitchen of a cook’s knife chopping meat for the approaching meal. The sun had absorbed the turbulence of men as well as the harshness of earth. The Prince moved towards the priest’s table, sat down and began drawing pointed little Bourbon lilies with a carefully sharpened pencil which the Jesuit had left behind in his anger. He looked serious but so serene that Father Pirrone no longer felt on tenterhooks. “We’re not blind, my dear Father, we’re just human beings. We live in a changing reality to which we try to adapt ourselves like seaweed bending under the pressure of water. Holy Church has been granted an explicit promise of immortality; we, as a social class, have not. Any palliative which may give us another hundred years of life is like eternity to us. We may worry about our children and perhaps our grandchildren; but beyond what we can hope to stroke with these hands of ours we have no obligations. I cannot worry myself about what will happen to any possible descendants in the year 1960. The Church, yes, She must worry for She is destined not to die. Solace is implicit in Her desperation. Don’t you think that if now or in the future She could save herself by sacrificing us She wouldn’t do so? Of course She would, and rightly.

I think back to this so often in trying to make sense of the world - how there are people who have so much and people who have so little, and how I fit in with them both. Often I find myself trying to bridge the two worlds, to show people, either the people with so much or the people with so little, that everything is yours and everything is not yours. I want to make people understand that boxing ourselves into tiny cubbies based n class, race, ethnicity, religion—anything, really—comes from a poverty of mind, a poverty of imagination. The world is dull and cruel when we isolate ourselves. Survival, true survival of the body and soul, requires creativity, freedom of thought, collaboration. You might have time and I might have land. You might have ideas and I might have strength. You might have a tomato and I might have a knife. We need each other. We need to say: I honor the things that you respect and I value the things you cherish. I am not better than you. You are not better than me. Nobody is better than anyone else. Nobody is who you think they are at first glance. We need to see beyond the projections we cast onto each other. Each of us is so much grander, more nuanced, and more extraordinary than anybody thinks, including ourselves. […] I’ve seen enough to know that you can be a human with a mountain of resources and you can be a human with nothing, and you can be a monster either way. Everywhere, and especially at both extremes, you can find monsters. It’s at the extremes that people are most scared—scared of deprivation, one one end; and scared of their privilege, on the other. With privilege comes a nearly avoidable egoism and so much shame, and often the coping mechanism is to give. This is great and necessary, but giving, as a framework, creates problems. You give, I take; you take, I give—both scenarios establish hierarchy. Both instill entitlement. The only road to equality—a sense of common humanity; peace—is sharing, my mother’s orange. When we share, you are not using your privilege to get me to line up behind you. When we share, you are not insisting on being my savior. Claire and I always looked for the sharers, the people who just said, ‘I have sugar, I have water. Let’s share water. Let’s not make charity about it.

We have been south and suffered a great deal down there. Many have died of diseases which we have no name for. Our hearts looked and longed for this country where we were born. There are only a few of us left, and we only wanted a little ground, where we could live. We left our lodges standing, and ran away in the night. The troops followed us. I rode out and told the troops we did not want to fight; we only wanted to go north, and if they would let us alone we would kill no one. The only reply we got was a volley. After that we had to fight our way, but we killed none who did not fire at us first. My brother, Dull Knife, took one-half of the band and surrendered near Fort Robinson. [...] They gave up their guns, and then the whites killed them all.

Grief isn't always a knife-sharp twist in your heart or a dull bludgeon in your stomach, sometimes it's a net, cast suddenly and silently over your soul so that you feel trapped and suffocated by its grasp. I feel the loss in the deepest recesses of myself, hidden parts of my mind and my matter, united in missing someone I will never see again.

Before we dive into specific examples, let’s first look at a simple, four-step, codified breakdown for a typical infomercial pitch: 1. The Problem: Here’s the problem you’re experiencing today, based on your status quo state or the solution you’re already using. This is where the tension is created. Where they “cut you” and get you to see you are bleeding (as we discussed in chapter 4)! In some cases, this pain might be top of mind, or it might be hidden, latent, or even something you may not think about all that often. This is also a perfect place to call out the enemy you identified earlier in this chapter. For example, if this were an infomercial for a set of space-aged kitchen knives that never need sharpening, the narrative might begin with a poor fool trying to cut a red, ripe tomato with an old, dull knife. As the grainy black-and-white footage rolls, the unsuspecting subject squashes the tomato with their sub-par knife, sending seeds and tomato flesh flying in all directions (and ruining the white suit they were wearing for some reason). Tension is created as the viewer starts to see themselves as the subject or hero of this story. 2. The Ideal Solution: Here’s the ideal solution to the problem. While not always top of mind, people often know the solutions to problems but see them as requiring too much effort and cost. In other words, spending money or investing time doing something our hero doesn’t want to do can usually solve the problem. This is where that solution is positioned. For example, the ideal solution to our dull knife problem is to go to a fancy kitchen store and purchase some top-of-the-line Japanese hand-forged steel knives. In a business context, many problems can be solved by throwing tons of time, money, and both human and technical resources at a them. 3. The Problem with That Ideal Solution: This is what makes that ideal solution difficult or less desirable. Here, you are creating contrast between where your hero is today and where they need to get to—a large gap they need to overcome. In doing this you are positioning the ideal solution as something they don’t want to or can’t make happen. For example, you could go to the kitchen store and buy those fancy knives, but they cost hundreds of dollars that you would rather not spend. The same goes for the massive business resource splurge suggested in the previous step. 4. Enter Our Solution: The stunning climax! Here’s how investing in our product, service, or solution can help you overcome the problem and pain you’re experiencing, while at the same time circumventing the challenges associated with the ideal solution.

what they want, Vallejo writing about loneliness while starving to death; Van Gogh’s ear rejected by a whore; Rimbaud running off to Africa to look for gold and finding an incurable case of syphilis; Beethoven gone deaf; Pound dragged through the streets in a cage; Chatterton taking rat poison; Hemingway’s brains dropping into the orange juice; Pascal cutting his wrists in the bathtub; Artaud locked up with the mad; Dostoevsky stood up against a wall; Crane jumping into a boat propeller; Lorca shot in the road by Spanish troops; Berryman jumping off a bridge; Burroughs shooting his wife; Mailer knifing his. – that’s what they want: a God damned show a lit billboard in the middle of hell. that’s what they want, that bunch of dull inarticulate safe dreary admirers of carnivals.

But honesty was a dull blade to take into a knife fight with Richard Nixon — who was simply willing to lie.

but the silence doesn’t end, you see, they leave open the possibility that what you want will be returned some day and so you remain reduced, paralysed, dull as an old knife, and the silence does not end because the silence is the source of their power, that is its secret meaning.

It would be so easy, to drag Raihn to a dark corner of this crowded ballroom, kiss him, drag his hand between my legs, let him feel my desire for him. I could take him away. Let him slide this dress off my body. Let him spear me against the wall, fuck me while I sank my teeth into his throat to dull my screams. And what a distraction it would be, when I buried the knife strapped to my upper thigh into his chest. Right where I did it last time.

Suicide [10w] Bring a dull knife to your suicide to get attention.

An engineer’s skills are like the blade of a knife: you may spend tens of thousands of dollars to find engineers with the sharpest skills for your team, but if you “use” that knife for years without sharpening it, you will wind up with a dull knife that is inefficient, and in some cases useless.

BECKETT: Do you know what I dream of, Difford? Do you know what I think about every night? I dream of the day I see my wife again. I picture sliding my hands around her neck and feeling her hands flail against my chest. I envision choking her to the edge of unconsciousness. And then, while she’s lying there, staring at me helplessly, I pick up a dull Swiss Army knife and hack off her fingers one by one. Then her ears. Then her nose. And then, then I cut out her beating heart. I’ll do it someday, Difford. And when I do, I’ll mail her heart to you. Lieutenant

The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding of Quality, the classic. It would tell you how to hold the blade when sharpening the knife, or how to use a sewing machine, or how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, “good” would naturally follow. The ability to see directly what “looks good” would be ignored. The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it’s not just depressingly dull, it’s also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one has ever told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style. Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.

Saffron, how are you?" Logan asks and he sounds genuinely interested. How am I? Small talk, right. I rest my hip on the table and give my back to Logan as I look down at his date. "Would you think it odd for a man to come to a small town and proceed to not speak to you for six months?" Her perfect lips form a grin. "Everyone or just me specifically?" "You, specifically." Her eyes light with humor. "Yes, that is odd." "Odder still for that man to then take you to bed and blow your mind with sex for almost twenty-four hours before ditching you and then staying off the radar for a week?" The humor has left her gaze now, but she answers anyway. "Indeed." "So what would you think when that same man shows up at your place of employment with a beautiful woman and attempts to engage you in small talk?" Her eyes leave mine for Logan's, but I don't miss the emotion in her gaze. She's mad. "Exactly." I turn and give Logan my full attention. "So how am I, Logan?" I pull out the chair next to him and sit down. "I could pretend to be a cool, sophisticated woman and lie to you and say I'm fabulous, but that just isn't me. What I am is hurt and more than a little pissed, so the idea of making small talk with you is repugnant to me, unless that talk is centered on what I'd like to do to you. For example, I'd love to reach for that dull butter knife and stick it in your eye, giving it a hard turn just for good measure. The idea of strapping you to a man-sized lobster trap and throwing you into the ocean holds a great deal of appeal, as does the thought of running your ass over with my car, repeatedly. I could sit here all day making small talk about that, or you could just shut up and order some goddamn lunch.

I hold out my hand for the knife. She seems hesitant. Like it’s a life jacket and she’s drowning in the ocean. “My mom gave it to me,” I say. She looks at me. I don’t tell her that it’s cut the lips, eyelids, foreskin, and asshole off a man before. I wanted a dull knife to draw out his agony. Like he did for me.

What does nostalgia mean to a child? An abstraction. A standing stone waiting for them in the mist. Walk a path across some decades, any path you like, and the word will gather weight. It will come to you trailing maybes and might-have-beens. Nostalgia is a drug, a knife. Against young skin it carries a dull edge, but time will teach you that nostalgia cuts—and that it’s a blade we cannot keep from applying to our own flesh.

Her gaze flicked to the Starsword strapped to Azriel’s back, then to his side, to the knife hanging there. Her ears hollowed out for a moment, a dull thump sounding once, and her hand spasmed, seemingly tugged toward those blades. Azriel’s wings twitched at the same moment, and he rolled his shoulders, like he was shaking off some phantom touch.

Nostalgia is a drug, a knife. Against young skin it carries a dull edge, but time will teach you that nostalgia cuts - and that it's a blade we cannot keep from applying to our own flesh.

I don’t sleep much at all, she says, I dream each night of a soundless sleep but that is impossible now, it took me some time before I understood that I was already asleep in a manner, you know, that I was sleeping all the time I thought I was awake, trying to see into the problem that stood before me like a great darkness, this silence consuming every moment of my life, I thought I’d go mad looking into it but then I awoke and began to see what they were doing to us, the brilliance of the act, they take something from you and replace it with silence and you’re confronted by that silence every waking moment and cannot live, you cease to be yourself and become a thing before this silence, a thing waiting for the silence to end, a thing on your knees begging and whispering to it all night and day, a thing waiting for what was taken to be returned and only then can you resume your life, but the silence doesn’t end, you see, they leave open the possibility that what you want will be returned some day and so you remain reduced, paralysed, dull as an old knife, and the silence does not end because the silence is the source of their power, that is its secret meaning.

What does nostalgia mean to a child? An abstraction. A standing stone waiting for them in the mist. Walk a path across some decades, any path you like, and the word will gather weight. It will come to you trailing maybes and might-have-beens. Nostalgia is a drug, a knife. Against young skin it carries a dull edge, but time will teach you that nostalgia cuts—and that it’s a blade we cannot keep from applying to our own flesh.

Sorel pac boots,

AGES 6 TO 7: BASIC COOKING TECHNIQUES. Kids at this age can start to help with cooking meals, and can learn to: • mix, stir, and cut with a dull knife • make a basic meal, such as a sandwich • help put the groceries away • wash the dishes • use basic household cleaners safely • straighten up the bathroom after using it • make his bed without assistance • bathe unsupervised

I could cut the tension with a dull knife," Pella says. "Just sleep together already and get it out of your system.

I’m clearly as powerful as a dull knife against a pineapple.

Does it ever stop hurting?” she asked. His green eyes glinted. “No. It never stops hurting. Grief is a knife blade. In time the sharpest edges may grow dull. And your heart may learn to beat around it. But the blade cannot be pulled out. It reshapes you on the inside. You can be whole again. But you cannot ever be the same.

The Minnesota State Weather observer at Pine River Dam recorded a minimum temperature of 46 below on December 29; observers at Pokegama Falls and Leech Lake Dam were unable to take temperature readings that day because the mercury inside their government-issued thermometers froze solid. It's hard to find vocabulary for weather this cold. The senses first become sharp and then dulled. Objects etch themselves with hyperclarity on the dense air, but it's hard to keep your eyes open to look at them steadily. When you first step outside from a heated space, the blast from 46-below-zero air clears the mind like a ringing slap. After a breath or two, ice builds up on the hairs of your nasal passages and the clear film bathing your eyeballs thickens. If the wind is calm and your body, head, and hands are covered, you feel preternaturally alert and focused. At first. A dozen paces from the door, your throat begins to feel raw, your lips dry and crack, tears sting the corners of your eyes. The cold becomes at once a knife and, paradoxically, a flame, cutting and scorching exposed skin.

All of us kids walked home for lunch, anxious to see our moms and grandmas. Lunch would be waiting and the television, which I so loved, was always set to “The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show.” When he signed off with “God bless your pea-picking hearts!” I was out the door and back to my friends for the walk back to school. A better place to raise a family could never have been found. The milkman delivered quite a few quart glass bottles with the cream for coffee floating on top. A Wonder Bread delivery man lived next door. He delivered only to stores, but would bring us cute miniature loaves of bread once in a while. The scissors and knife sharpener man made his rounds. Grandma loved to work with sharp scissors and admonished us, “Don’t ever cut paper with my shears, it dulls the blades.” I felt sorry for the poor Fuller Brush man since my Mom never would buy anything, but she’d take the free samples. Maybe he just liked talking to my Mom who loved to talk. My favorite was the Good Humor ice cream truck, of course.

A few of Delia’s stray hairs tickled my wrist as my fingers snagged on the sticky roll of duct tape I’d used to fix her hair. Something bit me as I shoved it aside. With a yelp, I whipped my hand from the bag. A thin line of blood beaded along my fingers. Carefully, I plucked aside the blood-stained burp rag I’d used to clean my daughter’s forehead that morning. Below it, I found the dull kitchen knife I’d thrown in with it, along with the keys to my van.