Sticks And Stones May Quotes

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It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me - such bullshit.
Lauren Oliver (Delirium (Delirium, #1))
Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts...
Robert Fulghum
Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts
Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)
Sticks and stones may break your bones, but Chinese throwing stars get you a dozen stitches.
Jim Butcher (Dead Beat (The Dresden Files, #7))
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me.
Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot (Memoir, #1))
Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can hurt like hell.
Chuck Palahniuk (Lullaby)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but if you want to hurt someone...way down deep, use words.
Charles Martin (The Mountain Between Us)
I hadn't fully realized just how powerful words could be before this. Whoever came up with the saying 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me' was talking out of his or her armpit.
Malorie Blackman (Noughts & Crosses (Noughts & Crosses, #1))
Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can break hearts.
Tim Minchin
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but I might be a vampire so I don't give a shit. I'll heal
Gena Showalter (Lord of the Vampires (Royal House of Shadows, #1))
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.
Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot (Memoir, #1))
Sticks and stones and small caliber bullets may break my bones... Words will never, et cetera.
Jim Butcher (White Night (The Dresden Files, #9))
People who say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” don’t understand how words can be stones, hard and sharp-edged and dangerous and capable of doing so much more harm than anything physical.
Seanan McGuire (Middlegame (Alchemical Journeys, #1))
Machines and relatives get most of the yelling. But never trees. As for people, well, the Solomon islanders may have a point. Yelling at living thing does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts.
Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)
Sticks and stones may break our bones, but names will break our spirit.
James Howe (The Misfits (The Misfits, #1))
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but your words...they'll destroy my soul.
Cassandra Giovanni (Love Exactly)
Sticks and stones may break your bones, but watch out for those damn words.
Chuck Palahniuk (Lullaby)
Sticks and stones may break my bones,but words will never hurt me.
Madeleine Urban (Sticks & Stones (Cut & Run, #2))
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me - such bullshit.
Lauren Oliver (Delirium (Delirium, #1))
Sticks and stones may break my bones’, as they say in the Middle Worlds, but with the right words you can build a world and make yourself the king of it.
Joanne Harris (The Gospel of Loki (Loki, #1))
Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me.” This is a lie. What we say matters. The unkind things we communicate can soil the best of relationships; even with the deepest of regrets…what lingers is a stain of hurt that may fade but will never truly go away. The wounding words we say are like feathers released in a harsh wind, once said; we will never get them back. ~Jason Versey
Jason Versey (A Walk with Prudence)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can also hurt me. Stones and sticks break only skin, while words are ghosts that haunt me. Slant and curved the word-swords fall, it pierces and sticks inside me. Bats and bricks may ache through bones, but words can mortify me. Pain from words has left its' scar, on mind and hear that's tender. Cuts and bruises have not healed, it's words that I remember.
Ruby Redfort
Stick and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you.
Chuck Palahniuk (Lullaby)
Colin thought about the dork mantra: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. What a dirty lie.
John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words from stupid Russian kidnappers can never hurt me.
Ally Carter (Not If I Save You First)
Strange how mean words can return to ones thoughts, years after they’ve been callously thrown at you. They replay in your mind, spiking a sense of remembered pain. Nasty name calling can be an ugly memory that stabs unexpectedly—not unlike a nightmare where you wake up crying. Sticks and stones, may break your bones—yet, cruel names can hurt you.
Nikki Sex (Abuse (Abuse, #1))
Maddie shrugged at that. She actually looked like she might start chanting, Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words from stupid Russian kidnappers can never hurt me.
Ally Carter (Not If I Save You First)
Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts … . — Robert Fulghum
Patricia Evans (The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond)
The Doctor: I just don’t like nastiness, and people getting away with it. Churchwell: That sounds a rather, if you forgive me, innocent view. The Doctor: That’s as may be, but I’m sticking to it.
Paul Magrs (Doctor Who: The Stones of Venice)
I always disliked the expression sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me. It is one of the least useful ways of understanding one another, or how words work.
Eley Williams (The Liar's Dictionary)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me', said some idiot who, 1. Didn't realize HOW much words hurt 2. Wasn't so smart
Oreo Queen
Grown-ups and children are not readily encouraged to unearth the power of words. Adults are repeatedly assured a picture is worth a thousand of them, while the playground response to almost any verbal taunt is 'sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.' I don't beg so much as command to differ.
Inga Muscio (Cunt: A Declaration of Independence)
Whoever said ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me’ clearly hasn’t been on the receiving end of people who spend the vast majority of their time using hateful words.
Matt Shaw (The 8th)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me. So throw me down, tie me up, and show me how you like me.
Skye Eagleday (Dark Passions (Dark Romance Boxed Set))
Sticks and stones may break bones, but words dig and dig and dig deep into your heart until the hurt resonates, and your heart fails to remember the reason it beats in the first place.
Jay McLean (Lucas (Preston Brothers, #1))
Whoever came up with the saying ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me’ was talking out of his or her armpit.
Malorie Blackman (Noughts & Crosses (Noughts & Crosses, #1))
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.' Yeah, well, whoever wrote that was a friggin' idiot.
Marley Gibson (The Awakening (Ghost Huntress, #1))
sticks and stones may break my bones but words can do permanent damage
Chuck D. (Public Enemy)
What is that old children’s rhyme, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’? Anyone who says that doesn’t understand the power of words. They can cut deeper than any knife, hit harder than any fist, touch parts of you that nothing physical will ever reach, and the wounds that some words leave never heal, because each time the word is thrown at you, labeled on you, you bleed afresh from it. It’s more like a whip that cuts every time, until you feel it must flay the very skin from your bones, and yet outwardly there is no wound to show the world, so they think you are not hurt, when inside part of you dies every time.
Laurell K. Hamilton (A Shiver of Light (Merry Gentry, #9))
Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will make you go into a corner by myself and cry for hours.
Eric Idle
Sticks and stones may break your bones, but I will surely kill you.
Kate Sweeney (Away From the Dawn (Dawn, #1))
Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will break my soul.
Kathryn Lopez
Colin thought about the dork mantra: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. What a dirty lie. This, right here, was the true abdominal snowman: it felt like something freezing in his stomach. "I love you so much and I just want you to love me like I love you," he said as softly as he could. "You don't need a girlfriend, Colin. You need a robot who says nothing but 'I love you.
John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)
Unkindness is a serial killer. Death in the flesh sometimes seems like a less excruciating way to succumb than the slow and steady venom unleashed by mean-spirited, cruel words and actions that poison you over time. I guess that’s why I can’t stand the old children’s rhyme: sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. Every time I hear it, I think to myself: that’s a lie. You can dodge a rock, but you can’t unhear a word. You can’t undo the intentional damage that some words have on your mind, body, and spirit. Especially a word like ugly.
Tarana Burke (Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words are merely the smallest element of language capable of containing meaning in isolation and as such can never directly produce the four thousand Newtons force per square centimeter required to break bones.
Vsauce
The saying “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” couldn't be further from the truth. Broken bones heal; words can stick with you for a lifetime.
Madison Beer (The Half of It: A Memoir)
Sticks and stones may break bones, but words can shatter souls. Choose carefully the words you say to others. Choose wisely the words you say to yourself. Words have a way of becoming truths we believe about ourselves. And what we believe, we become.
L.R. Knost
Stick and stones may break your bones and words can kill you too
Chuck Palahniuk (Lullaby)
is a broken man an outlaw?" "More or less." Brienne answered. Septon Meribald disagreed. "More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They've heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. "Then they get a taste of battle. "For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they've been gutted by an axe. "They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that's still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water. "If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they're fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chicken's, and from there it's just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don't know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they're fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world... "And the man breaks. "He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them...but he should pity them as well
George R.R. Martin
Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts. . . .
Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)
sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. What a dirty lie.
John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but hollow points expand on impact. -T-shirt
Lani Lynn Vale (Bang Switch (Code 11-KPD SWAT, #3))
Whoever said Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you was an idiot.
Valerie Burns (Two Parts Sugar, One Part Murder (Baker Street Mystery #1))
They may throw sticks, stones, or bricks, but nothing they do will hurt you. You are protected by God. He is forever got you covered and the enemy is defeated. Their hatred towards you is a reflection of the evilness on their inside which is slowly destroying them. A person like that must deal with the matters of their heart.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana (Release The Ink)
My stomach gets that hollowed-out feeling. It’s amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me—such bullshit.
Lauren Oliver (Delirium (Delirium, #1))
Abuse is exploitation of trust and exploitation of authority and I was lucky enough never to suffer from that or from any violation or cruelty, real or imagined. It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.
Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot (Memoir, #1))
What is that old children's rhyme, 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me'? Anyone who says that doesn't understand the power of words. They can cut deeper than any knife, hit harder than any fist, touch parts of you that nothing physical will ever reach, and the wounds that some words leave never heal, because each time the word is thrown at you, labeled on you, you bleed afresh from it. It's more like a whip that cuts every time, until you feel it must flay the very skin from your bones, and yet outwardly there is no wound to show the world, so they think you are not hurt, when inside part of you dies every time."~Sholto, from A Shiver of Light
Laurell K. Hamilton
There is an important message here about the power of words, labels, rhetoric, and stereotyped labeling, to be used for good or evil. We need to refashion the childhood rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me,” to alter the last phrase to “but bad names can kill me, and good ones can comfort me.
Philip G. Zimbardo (The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil)
Sticks & stones may break your bones & hurtful words can destroy more than you know!
Timothy Pina
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but grenades and air strikes will silence Allah's throne.
Mingo Kane (Scars of the Prophet: A Novel of War and Romance)
The old saying goes, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Yet, my own negative self-talk is certain to make my words both sticks and stones.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
May sticks and stones break your bones, And serpents stop your heart. A spell to poison, requiring fangs & fury
Alix E. Harrow (The Once and Future Witches)
Sticks and stones may break your bones, and words – can cut your insides.
Jen Pollock Michel (Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words have the power to destroy me
Ellie Messe
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but ‘no’ can never hurt me!
Richard Fenton (Go for No! Yes is the Destination, No is How You Get There)
Sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt. Lies. Words hurt. The words we remember. Well, the hurt feeling the words caused stays with us forever.
Jill Telford
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but if you want to hurt someone…way down deep, use words.
Charles Martin (The Mountain Between Us)
Whoever had come up with the chant “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” had been an idiot.
Nevada Barr (Deep South (Anna Pigeon, #8))
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me—such bullshit.
Lauren Oliver (Delirium (Delirium, #1))
Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts … . — Robert Fulghum Most
Patricia Evans (The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me, especially when I do not understand them.
C.S. Forester (Mr. Midshipman Hornblower)
Once you understand that you are the thinker of your own thoughts, and that your mind doesn‘t produce ‘reality’, it produces ‘thoughts’, you won’t be as affected by what you think. You’ll see your thinking as something that you are doing – an ability you have that brings your experience of life – rather than as the source of reality. Do you remember the old saying ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me’? Thoughts could be substituted for words. Your thoughts can’t hurt or depress you once you understand that they are just thoughts. When you start to view your own thinking in this more impersonal way (in other words, looking at your thinking instead of being caught in it), you will find yourself becoming free of depression. Your thinking goes on and on, and it will continue to do so for as long as you live. But when you step back from your thinking and simply observe that you are doing it, your mind becomes free, and you open the door to experience.
Richard Carlson (Stop Thinking, Start Living: Discover Lifelong Happiness)
Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliancies, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain, said I do. A row of shining hubcaps on sticks appeared in the front yard of the Burkes’ house. A wedding present from the bride’s father. For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.
Annie Proulx (The Shipping News)
The nursery rhyme “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me” is a lie that every five-year-old knows in their deep waters. Words hurt, because they are one of the only socially acceptable ways we can attack each other.
Kory Stamper (Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries)
As children we are taught, "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me!" As adults we teach those same words to our own children while simultaneously we sue one another for defamation or verbal assault. Ah, the naked leading the blind.
Bryan Oftedahl
We must stay conscious of our words. We’ve all heard that little phrase when we were kids. “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Well, I call BULLSHIT! As cute as that is and as much as I wish it were true, it’s not. Words are powerful, they can hurt or they can heal.
Rachel D. Greenwell (How To Wear A Crown: A Practical Guide To Knowing Your Worth)
Stick and stones may break my bones, but verbal abuse is trauma that lasts forever.
Heidi Hutchinson (Key Change (Common Threads, #3))
While these young Muslims and young feminists may superficially seem to have little in common, they were indistinguishable from each other in demanding bans and apologies for what they considered offensive, dangerous ideas. Both groups agreed that my advice that 'sticks and stones might break your bones, but words will never hurt me' was an outdated misunderstanding of the fundamental damage that words can inflict on vulnerable individuals.
Claire Fox (‘I Find That Offensive!’)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’? Anyone who says that doesn’t understand the power of words. They can cut deeper than any knife, hit harder than any fist, touch parts of you that nothing physical will ever reach, and the wounds that some words leave never heal, because each time the word is thrown at you, labeled on you, you bleed afresh from it. It’s more like a whip that cuts every time, until you feel it must flay the very skin from your bones, and yet outwardly there is no wound to show the world, so they think you are not hurt, when inside part of you dies every time.
Laurell K. Hamilton (A Shiver of Light (Merry Gentry, #9))
What is that old children’s rhyme, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’? Anyone who says that doesn’t understand the power of words. They can cut deeper than any knife, hit harder than any fist, touch parts of you that nothing physical will ever reach, and the wounds that some words leave never heal, because each time the word is thrown at you, labeled on you, you bleed afresh from it. It’s more like a whip that cuts every time, until you feel it must flay the very skin from your bones, and yet outwardly there is no wound to show the world, so they think you are not hurt, when inside part of you dies every time.” ― A Shiver of Light
Laurell K. Hamilton
People who say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” don’t understand how words can be stones, hard and sharp-edged and dangerous and capable of doing so much more harm than anything physical. If someone chucks a real stone at you on the playground, it leaves a bruise. Bruises heal. Bruises get people in trouble, too; bruises end with detentions for the rock-throwers, with disapproving parents ushered into private offices for serious conversations about bullying and bad behavior. Words almost never end that way. Words can be whispered bullet-quick when no one’s looking, and words don’t leave blood or bruises behind. Words disappear without a trace. That’s what makes them so powerful. That’s what makes them so important. That’s what makes them hurt so much.
Seanan McGuire (Middlegame (Alchemical Journeys, #1))
Dominion over his environment was supposed to be a hallmark of man. Now, that dominion is almost wholly vicarious, derived from the past ingenuity of others. In urban and industrial communities it is never direct, physical or spontaneous. Our implements are at twelve removes and we may all live to live inside so many Thermos flasks. It may be well to remember how to use a pair of sticks and a stone.
Sybille Bedford (A Visit to Don Otavio)
Eddie: What has four wheels and flies? Blaine: (disapproving) THE TOWN GARBAGE WAGON, AS I HAVE ALREADY SAID. ARE YOU SO STUPID OR INATTENTIVE THAT YOU DO NOT REMEMBER? IT WAS THE FIRST RIDDLE YOU ASKED ME. Eddie: (in his mind) Yes. And what we all missed--because we were fixated on stumping you with some brain-buster out of Roland's past or Jake's book--is that the contest almost ended right there. (to Blaine) You didn't like that one, did you, Blaine? Blaine: (agreeably) I FOUND IT EXCEEDINGLY STUPID. PERHAPS THAT'S WHY YOU ASKED IT AGAIN. LIKE CALLS TO LIKE, EDDIE OF NEW YORK, IS IT NOT SO? Eddie: (smiling and shaking his finger) Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Or, as we used to say back in the neighborhood, 'You can rank me to the dogs and back, but I'll never lose the hard-on I use to fuck your mother.' Jake: Hurry up! If you can do something, DO IT! Eddie: It doesn't like silly questions. It doesn't like silly games. And we KNEW that. We knew it from Charlie the Choo-Choo. How stupid can you get? Hell, THAT was the book with the answers, not Riddle-De-Dum, but we never saw it. (to Blaine) Blaine: when is a door not a door? Blaine: (clicking his tongue) WHEN IT'S AJAR, OF COURSE. WOULD YOU DIE WITH SUCH STUPID RIDDLES IN YOUR MOUTH?
Stephen King (Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, #4))
I was the only one left in the tomb then. I sort of liked it, in a way. It was so nice and peaceful. Then, all of a sudden, you’d never guess what I saw on the wall. Another “Fuck you.” It was written with a red crayon or something, right under the glass part of the wall, under the stones. That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say “Holden Caulfield” on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say “Fuck you.” I’m positive, in fact.
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
I was the only one left in the tomb then. I sort of liked it, in a way. It was so nice and peaceful. Then, all of a sudden, you'd never guess what I saw on the wall. Another "Fuck you." It was written with a red crayon or something, right under the glass part of the wall, under the stones. That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say "Fuck you." I'm positive, in fact.
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
longer; it cannot deceive them too much." Madame Defarge looked superciliously at the client, and nodded in confirmation. "As to you," said she, "you would shout and shed tears for anything, if it made a show and a noise. Say! Would you not?" "Truly, madame, I think so. For the moment." "If you were shown a great heap of dolls, and were set upon them to pluck them to pieces and despoil them for your own advantage, you would pick out the richest and gayest. Say! Would you not?" "Truly yes, madame." "Yes. And if you were shown a flock of birds, unable to fly, and were set upon them to strip them of their feathers for your own advantage, you would set upon the birds of the finest feathers; would you not?" "It is true, madame." "You have seen both dolls and birds to-day," said Madame Defarge, with a wave of her hand towards the place where they had last been apparent; "now, go home!" XVI. Still Knitting Madame Defarge and monsieur her husband returned amicably to the bosom of Saint Antoine, while a speck in a blue cap toiled through the darkness, and through the dust, and down the weary miles of avenue by the wayside, slowly tending towards that point of the compass where the chateau of Monsieur the Marquis, now in his grave, listened to the whispering trees. Such ample leisure had the stone faces, now, for listening to the trees and to the fountain, that the few village scarecrows who, in their quest for herbs to eat and fragments of dead stick to burn, strayed within sight of the great stone courtyard and terrace staircase, had it borne in upon their starved fancy that the expression of the faces was altered. A rumour just lived in the village—had a faint and bare existence there, as its people had—that when the knife struck home, the faces changed, from faces of pride to faces of anger and pain; also, that when that dangling figure was hauled up forty feet above the fountain, they changed again, and bore a cruel look of being avenged, which they would henceforth bear for ever. In the stone face over the great window of the bed-chamber where the murder was done, two fine dints were pointed out in the sculptured nose, which everybody recognised, and which nobody had seen of old; and on the scarce occasions when two or three ragged peasants emerged from the crowd to take a hurried peep at Monsieur the Marquis petrified, a skinny finger would not have pointed to it for a minute, before they all started away among the moss and leaves, like the more fortunate hares who could find a living there. Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the stone floor, and the pure water in the village well—thousands of acres of land—a whole province of France—all France itself—lay under the night sky, concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line. So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
Game of Thrones - Feast for Crows. “Ser? My lady?" said Podrick. "Is a broken man an outlaw?" "More or less," Brienne answered. Septon Meribald disagreed. "More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They've heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. "Then they get a taste of battle. "For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they've been gutted by an axe. "They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that's still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water. "If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they're fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it's just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don't know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they're fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world . . . "And the man breaks. "He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them . . . but he should pity them as well.
G R R Martin
38 Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said: 2 “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? 3 Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. 4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. 5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? 6 On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone— 7 while the morning stars sang together and all the angels[a] shouted for joy? 8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, 9 when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, 10 when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, 11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt’? 12 “Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place, 13 that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it? 14 The earth takes shape like clay under a seal; its features stand out like those of a garment. 15 The wicked are denied their light, and their upraised arm is broken. 16 “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? 17 Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness? 18 Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth? Tell me, if you know all this. 19 “What is the way to the abode of light? And where does darkness reside? 20 Can you take them to their places? Do you know the paths to their dwellings? 21 Surely you know, for you were already born! You have lived so many years! 22 “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, 23 which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle? 24 What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? 25 Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, 26 to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert, 27 to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass? 28 Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? 29 From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens 30 when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen? 31 “Can you bind the chains[b] of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion’s belt? 32 Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons[c] or lead out the Bear[d] with its cubs? 33 Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God’s[e] dominion over the earth? 34 “Can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water? 35 Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’? 36 Who gives the ibis wisdom[f] or gives the rooster understanding?[g] 37 Who has the wisdom to count the clouds? Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens 38 when the dust becomes hard and the clods of earth stick together? 39 “Do you hunt the prey for the lioness and satisfy the hunger of the lions 40 when they crouch in their dens or lie in wait in a thicket? 41 Who provides food for the raven when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food?
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Sticks and stones may break my bones, but my past does not define me.
Rachael Brownell (Sticks & Stones)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but I can heal from that. Words can kill, when they break your will, and words you can't take back. - The Malwatch
Scaylen Renvac
Who says sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me? A guy who has never been hit with a dictionary!
Smiley Beagle (You Laugh You Lose Challenge: 300 Jokes for Kids that are Funny, Silly, and Interactive Fun the Whole Family Will Love - With Illustrations ... for Kids)
Death in the flesh sometimes seems like a less excruciating way to succumb than the slow and steady venom unleashed by mean-spirited, cruel words and actions that poison you over time. I guess that’s why I can’t stand the old children’s rhyme: sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.
Tarana Burke (Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement)
Smart kids get put on a pedestal by parents and teachers alike, and the rest of the class gathers around the base of it throwing rocks, trying to knock them down. People who say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” don’t understand how words can be stones, hard and sharp-edged and dangerous and capable of doing so much more harm than anything physical.
Seanan McGuire (Middlegame (Alchemical Journeys, #1))
A circle formed from sticks and stones. The seeds of life in the form of cones, the rocks for strength, the sticks for kin, protect whoever may step within.
Jessica Dodge (The Forgotten Witch)
sometimes we see more than a building more than sticks and stones it represents the heart. of peoples memories You may have been touched too
levipaultaylor
It happened as it always did, swallowing her swiftly and completely. Intense. Painful. Quick, vivid colors spun beneath her eyelids. Sounds were sharp inside her skull. Fire shot up through her bones. She may have been screaming and she wouldn’t have known. There was smoke in her nose, thick and black, and she couldn’t breathe. It stung her eyes and licked at her skin. Wood and metal crashed down as skin blistered and popped and she knew this wasn’t her, knew it was someone else, someone with a bigger body, bigger boots and darker jeans, and big ol’ hands with scars on the fingers. Men’s hands. Nails blunt and dirty with oil and grease and burning and- The cars were on fire. Paper burned and curled and rags ignited, the cement floor pockmarked by flash fires. Meat withered in her nose and she realized it was her. Him. Dancing embers blackened and burned bone. He screamed and she hoped she was not. He writhed and she really hoped she was not. He was dying, dead, and-
Angele Gougeon (Sticks and Stones)
From a commonsense point of view, to assert that that which moves a stone, piece of iron, or a stick, is what heats it, seems like an extreme vanity. But the friction produced when two hard bodies are rubbed together, which either reduces them to fine flying particles or permits the corpuscles of flame contained in them to escape, can finally be analyzed as motion. And the particles, when they encounter our body and penetrate and tear through it, are felt, in their motion and contact, by the living creature, who thus feels those pleasant or unpleasant affections which we call “heat,” “burning,” or “scorching.” Perhaps while this pulverizing and attrition continue, and remain confined to the particles themselves, their motion will be temporary and their operation will be merely that of heating. But once we arrive at the point of ultimate and maximum dissolution into truly indivisible atoms, light itself may be created, with an instantaneous motion or (I should rather say) an instantaneous diffusion and expansion, capable—I do not know if by the atoms’ subtlety, rarity, immateriality, or by different and as yet unspecifiable conditions—capable, I say, of filling vast spaces.
Roger Ariew (Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” This may be one of the biggest lies ever placed on children. Words do hurt. Like emptying a pillow of feathers into the wind, it’s impossible to gather them back. The great King Solomon said, a word not fitly spoken can be like stealing a person’s coat in the dead of winter or pouring vinegar into an open wound.
Steven Sisler (The Four People Types: And what drives them)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. He
Madeleine Urban (Sticks & Stones (Cut & Run, #2))