Quotes about knuckle (40 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Religion was too vague. God was different. He was something real, something I could feel. But there were only certain times when I could feel it. I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I'd had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger-nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God. "I am clean, now. I've never been as clean. I'll never be cleaner."”

Frances Farmer (1913–1970) American actress

And somehow, it was God. I wasn't sure that it was… just something cool and dark and clean.
God Dies (1931)

God , Lie , Religion , Feeling

“When you're young, you're stupid. You do silly things. I did it (the O-Z-Z-Y tattoo across his knuckles) when I was 14. I was in jail for something. I could have had it removed, but why? It's my trademark. People stop me and say, 'Let me have a look at your hand.”

Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter

Launch.com October 30, 1998

People , Stupidity , Tattoo

“what was fang going to do BLOG about max throwing herself into space so she wouldn't have to kiss him again? NO instead he smashed his fist against the cave wall then grimaced at the pain and stupidity seeing his bloodied knuckles”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

Pain , Stupidity , Kiss

“Trace cursed. He actually wanted to hit something, but a tree would break his knuckles, he didn't want to put another dent in the truck, and Dare would hit back.”

Lori Foster (1958) American writer

Source: Trace of Fever

Tree

“Keep this and perhaps remember me."
Kieran's hands tightened on the arrowhead, his knuckles whitening. "The stars will go out before I forget you, Mark Blackthorn.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Star , Forgetting

“Who made the world I cannot tell;
'Tis made, and here am I in hell.
My hand, though now my knuckles bleed,
I never soiled with such a deed.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

No. 19, st. 2.
Source: More Poems http://www.kalliope.org/vaerktoc.pl?vid=housman/1936 (1936)

World , Hell

“It's a white-knuckle roller-coaster ride.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

“You've been reading Gordan's book again, haven't you?"
"It's a white-knuckle roller-coaster ride," she mumbled.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Playing with Fire

Books , Reading

“Akri won't let me eat any of them nasty gods. What's the world coming to when a demon gots to beg for tidbits… not eve a finger sandwich or a single knuckle. Tragic. Terribly tragic.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Styxx

God , World

“This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Groan

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 1 “The Hall of the Bright Carvings” (p. 9)

“Without hesitation, she made a fist and hit herself in the right eye, her knuckles making contact with the top of her cheekbone. And then she poured milk into her coffee.”

Lis Wiehl (1961) American legal scholar

Source: Heart of Ice A Triple Threat Novel with April Henry (Thomas Nelson), p. 201

Coffee

“"What the Republicans have been doing is an insult to America…. These are foot-dragging, knuckle-dragging neanderthals." [Questioned, 'Why are you name-calling?'] "I didn't call names, what I said is true."”

Alan Grayson (1958) American politician

CNN, YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTyAQEAseb0 –September 30, 2009. CNN Political Ticker http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/09/30/grayson-calls-republicans-knuckle-dragging-neanderthals/.
2009, Regarding the Republican Party

Question

““Your collection is not a woman. That’s only a metaphor—an abstraction! You’ll be dying for nothing, for a principle that nobody else can even comprehend.”
As she spoke, Jane became convinced that she herself would never willingly die for a principle. She might feel guilty about it, but she’d smile and lie, knuckle under, pretend, anything, in order to survive. It made her feel a little sad to realize this, but also, at the same time, very adult.”

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 15 (p. 263)

Lie , Sadness , Smile , Feeling

“What they had going certainly came as near as anyone ever has in this imperfect world to a sane, rational way for people to exist without warfare and with a minimum of politics. In the end, those two old dinosaurs are the only ways humans have yet discovered to be social animals. Yes, I do see war as a way of living with one another; by imposing your will on another in terms so unmistakable that the opponent has to either knuckle under to you, die, or beat your brains out. And if that’s a solution to anything, I'd rather live without solutions. Politics is not much better. The only thing going for it is that it occasionally succeeds in substituting talk for fists.”

John Varley (1947) American science fiction author

"The Persistence of Vision"

War , People , World , Way

“Here is how my father appeared to me as a boy. He came from a race of giants and demi-gods from a mythical land known as Chicago. He married the most beautiful girl ever to come crawling out of the poor and lowborn south, and there were times when I thought we were being raised by Zeus and Athena. After Happy Hour my father would drive his car home at a hundred miles an hour to see his wife and seven children. He would get out of his car, a strapping flight jacketed matinee idol, and walk toward his house, his knuckles dragging along the ground, his shoes stepping on and killing small animals in his slouching amble toward the home place. My sister, Carol, stationed at the door, would call out, "Godzilla's home!" and we seven children would scamper toward the door to watch his entry. The door would be flung open and the strongest Marine aviator on earth would shout, "Stand by for a fighter pilot!" He would then line his seven kids up against the wall and say, "Who's the greatest of them all?" "You are, O Great Santini, you are." "Who knows all, sees all, and hears all?" "You do, O Great Santini, you do."”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

We were not in the middle of a normal childhood, yet none of us were sure since it was the only childhood we would ever have. For all we knew other men were coming home and shouting to their families, "Stand by for a pharmacist," or "Stand by for a chiropractor".
Eulogy for a Fighter Pilot (1998)

Men , God , Children , Family

“A very distinguished colleague began his criticism of this show by asking what is Mr Astaire's secret. May I suggest that the solution hangs on a little word of three letters? Mr Astaire's secret is that of the late Rudolph Valentino and of Mr Maurice Chevalier — sex, but sex so bejewelled and be-pixied that the weaker vessels who fall for it can pretend that it isn't sex at all but a sublimated projection of the Little Fellow with the Knuckles in His Eyes. You'd have thought by the look of the first night foyer that it was Mothering Thursday, since every woman in the place was urgent to take to her bosom this waif with the sad eyes and the twinkling feet.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Theatre critic James Agate in a review of a 1933 London performance of Gay Divorce as quoted in Cooke, Alistair. "Fred Astaire Obituary", Letter From America, BBC World Service, June 28, 1987.

Secret , Sadness , Sex , Night

“Well it's bulls and blood,
It's dust and mud,
It's the roar of a Sunday crowd.
It's the white in his knuckles,
The gold in the buckle,
He'll win the next go 'round.
It's boots and chaps,
It's cowboy hats,
It's spurs and latigo.
It's the ropes and the reins,
And the joy and the pain,
And they call the thing rodeo.”

Garth Brooks (1962) American country music artist

Rodeo, written by Larry Bastian.
Song lyrics, Ropin' the Wind (1991)

Pain , Joy

“It's important to be open to new experiences. I recently went to Disneyland for the first time in 20 years. There were three of us 60-year-olds on a rollercoaster, screaming our heads off. It was white knuckles all the way and I loved it!”

Lulu (singer) (1948) Scottish singer, actress, and television personality

I'm through with having Botox, says pop diva Lulu, 2008-03-31, 2008-03-31, Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=550849&in_page_id=1879,

Love , Way , Time

“Don't drink. And that's serious. For me, that's one, because I never wrote, I was never creative while drinking, and there were these periods of not drinking and just kind of white-knuckling it and writing and recording, and then drinking a lot and coming into the studio hung over and being in the studio drunk and never being able to do anything to the level or to the degree that I thought that I should be. I'm proud of everything that I did, but I think it was a lot more difficult than it needed to be.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

When asked what he would write in a letter to himself at the age of 18 ** What Would CHRIS CORNELL Tell Himself At 18? 'Don't Drink', Blabbermouth, 4 November 2011 http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/what-would-chris-cornell-tell-himself-at-18-don-t-drink/,
Soundgarden Era

Drink , Thinking

“I let him strain for a couple of seconds. Then like taking candy from a baby, I flipped his arm over and cracked his knuckles on the top of the table. It was strictly no contest and he knew it. But he had to try again. Same results.”

Jimmy Hoffa (1913–1982) American labor leader

Source: Hoffa The Real Story (1975), Chapter 5, The Spoiled Brat, p. 98 (Arm wrestling Robert Kennedy, February 19, 1957, Chevy Chase, Maryland)

Baby

“[Aphrodite] set out, and after searching up and down Olympus for her boy, found him far away in the fruit-laden orchard of Zeus. With him was Ganymede, whose beauty had so captivated Zeus that he took him up to heaven to live with the immortals. The two lads, who had much in common, were playing with golden knuckle-bones. Eros, the greedy boy, was standing there with a whole handful of them clutched to his breast and a happy flush mantling his cheeks. Near by sat Ganymede, hunched up, silent and disconsolate, with only two left. He threw these for what they were worth in quick succession and was furious when Eros laughed. Of course he lost them both immediately – they joined the rest. So he went off in despair with empty hands and did not notice the goddess's approach. Aphrodite came up to her boy, took his chin in her hand, and said: 'Why this triumphant smile, you rascal?”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

I do believe you won the game unfairly by cheating a beginner…
Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book III. Jason and Medea

Smile , Beauty , Search , Boy

“"Cathy, this lamb of yours threatens like a bull!" he said. "It is in danger of splitting its skull against my knuckles. By God, Mr. Linton, I'm mortally sorry that you are not worth knocking down!"”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff (Ch. XI).
Wuthering Heights (1847)

God

“It seems to me that a great secret of early education is not to overrate the powers of attention in children. If they go to a church for instance, where there are long sermons, I should let them have scripture history, or lives of the Saints full of pictures, to be administered during the latter half of the discourse, rather than knuckle their ribs or prick them with pins, to make them "attend to what the gentleman says."”

Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker

The Life and letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher (AH Palmer, London, 1892)

Children , Secret , Education , History

“Americans are therefore wrong in assuming — and this was another line of argument against my RAS lecture — that South Koreans have struggled too long and too bravely for human rights ever to knuckle down to the North. There was no significant opposition here to the prosecution of Professor Park Yu-ha for criticizing the orthodox history of the so-called comfort women, and that took place under Park Geun-hye.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

Women , History

“You went around back, where in the playground kids were dangling from the jungle gym waiting for mothers; connie could feel their cold skinned knees and barked knuckles–Bunce always said that imagining pain and discomfort was worse for her than the real thing when it came, which it almost never did.”

John Crowley book Four Freedoms

Part Three, Chapter 1
Four Freedoms (2009)

Pain , Feeling , Imagination , Waiting

“Supposing Catherine Lim was writing about me and not the prime minister…She would not dare, right? Because my posture, my response has been such that nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul de sac…Anybody who decides to take me on needs to put on knuckle dusters. If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you, try. There is no other way you can govern a Chinese society.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

SM Lee Kuan Yew, The Man and His Ideas, 1997 http://books.google.com/books?id=ljOkLtGgIQYC&dq=Supposing+Catherine+Lim+was+writing+about+me+and+not+the+prime+minister..&source=gbs_navlinks_s
1990s

Way , Thinking , Hurt

“Yesterday we fought a great battle and gained a great victory, for which all the glory is due to God alone. Although under a heavy fire for several continuous hours I received only one wound, the breaking of the longest finger of my left hand; but the doctor says the finger may be saved. It was broken about midway between the hand and knuckle, the ball passing on the side next to the forefinger. Had it struck the centre, I should have lost the finger. My horse was wounded, but not killed. Your coat got an ugly wound near the hip, but my servant, who is very handy, has so far repaired it that it doesn't show very much. My preservation was entirely due, as was the glorious victory, to our God, to whom be all the honor, praise, and glory. The battle was the hardest that I have ever been in, but not near so hot in its fire.”

Thomas Jackson (1824–1863) Confederate general

Letter to his wife after the First Battle of Bull Run (22 July 1861); as quoted in Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson by His Widow Mary Anna Jackson (1895) http://books.google.com/books?id=bG2vg5cH004C, Ch. XI : The First Battle of Manassas, p. 178

God , Victory , Horse

“Yeah, I've got violence in me, but no negative violence. My violence is the violence of the free man who refuses to knuckle under. Creation is violent. Life is violent. Birth is a violent process. Tempests and earthquakes are violent movements of nature. My violence is the violence of life. It is not violence against nature, like the violence of the state, which sends your kids to the slaughterhouse, deadens your minds, and drives out your souls!”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

Source: Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996), p. 2

Life , Soul , Birth , Nature

“I believe from history and my own gut, instinct, that if I go ahead and lay it all out here, what we're really facing, you've got courage and you've got will, and you're gonna get angry and stop caring. It begins with not caring about what your slack-jawed knuckle-dragging cowardly pseudo tough-guy football-watching neighbor thinks. Okay? That's where it begins. It begins with not caring what happens to your individual person. And when you have that attitude, when you have that attitude, then the enemy doesn't have anything over you anymore. Stop being gelded domesticated garbage. Stop being weak! And when you see a threat coming down on you, deal with it! Become a human again! Stop being weak! We have a bunch of criminals coming down on us. God, ugh! Murdering scum. I wanna get humanity awake. I wanna get our forces up. And I wanna bring these people to justice. And you know what I mean. You know what I mean! I wanna unleash humanity, not have a bunch of con artist pot-bellied chicken-neck pieces of garbage running our world! More importantly they act like effeminate cowardly chicken necks cuz they want to train you to act like that they want to train you to be weak they want to train you. That's a nasty taste coming up in my mouth. Tastin' those globalists. I can taste their fear and their weakness. I taste metal, I taste blood.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

Alex's Bill Gates Chicken-Neck Bastard 'Rant' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg-5WgcMV_o, September 2011.

History , Thinking , Courage , Guy

“Although The Terminator is arguably the more visionary of the first two films, [Terminator 2] is the more visually and viscerally satisfying. It's an exhausting experience and, even 18 years after its release (as I write this review), few films have matched it within the science fiction genre for sheer white-knuckle exhilaration.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=1632 of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).
Three-and-a-half star reviews

Science

“I see my body float like leaves. Every day I want to breathe. Rap my knuckles till they bleed. A river deep.”

Ed Harcourt (1977) British musician

Bleed A River Deep

“Sometime 30 years ago I wrote a piece for the Stan Kenton Neophonic Band. The night of the concert at the Music Center Auditorium in Los Angeles Stan counted it off much too fast. When it came to the recapitulation at the end, the woodwind instrumentation had changed to mixtures of piccolos, flutes and saxes; and being too fast, it turned into a woodwind knuckle-buster. I was hiding on the floor between the seats. Later, when this was recorded, Stan counted too slowly. That recording was released without my piece. Years later when Stan created his "The Creative World of Stan Kenton" record company, Capitol was so angry that he had left them and released everything they had in the can to jeopardize his market. My piece was released with the first third cut off. I rewrote this for my present instrumentation and when we first went through it, while conducting, I was in tears to finally hear what I had written 30 years ago.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Discussing "Piece for Soft Brass, Woodwinds and Percussion"; from the liner notes for Jazz Corps

World , Music , Angels , Tear

“Hans had courage to burn. If he had been willing to knuckle under to the Nazis he would have stayed at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. But Hans was a scientist. He wouldn’t trim his notion of truth to fit political gangsters.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Rocket Ship Galileo

Source: Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), Chapter 4, “The Blood of Pioneers”, p. 34

Truth , Courage

“That knuckle-end of England—that land of Calvin, oatcakes, and sulphur.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Vol. I, ch. 2
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

“The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

"The Moon and the Yew Tree"
Ariel (1965)

Sea , Despair

“The one thing that drives me up the wall is [people] saying, 'Look at all the deaths you Americans have caused in Iraq.' No! 'Scuse me? We invaded the place, we knocked over Saddam, and then Iraqis began killing each other… [B]ut who is doing this killing? Give me a break. These are Iraqis killing each other. So what did we do? If you're saying it's our fault that we unmasked them as knuckle-dragging savages from the 10th century — fine! I'll take credit.”

John Gibson (media host) (1946) American radio talk show host

April 25, 2007 http://mediamatters.org/research/200704250008

Death , People

“I think I'm done gunnin to get closer.
To some imagined bliss.
I gotta knuckle down.
And just be ok with this.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

"Knuckle Down"
Song lyrics

Imagination , Thinking

“As he laboured up to his bedsit, a miniature roof conversion with sloping walls on the fifth floor of a narrow Victorian building in Kensington, Patrick seemed to regress through evolutionary history, growing more stooped with each flight, until he was resting his knuckles on the carpet of the top landing, like an early hominid that has not yet learned to stand upright on the grasslands of Africa and only makes rare and nervous expeditions down from the safety of the trees.”

Edward St. Aubyn (1960) British writer

At Last, Chapter 14

History , Tree , Learning

“I will be ashamed the day I feel I should knuckle under to social-political pressures about issues and research I think are important for the advance of scientific knowledge.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

Profiles in Research Author(s): Arthur Jensen, Daniel H. Robinson and Howard Wainer, Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Autumn, 2006), pp. 327-352
Context: [Interview: Responding to a question about whether it was smart to publish his 1969 article at the time he did] In retrospect, however, I would hope that I would not have changed a thing in that article, even if I had been able to imagine the supposed "storm" it caused. I will be ashamed the day I feel I should knuckle under to social-political pressures about issues and research I think are important for the advance of scientific knowledge.

Feeling , Knowledge , Thinking

“They claimed that the old man had a knuckle-duster on his right, which is ridiculous and a dirty lie. He had it on his left.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Pit of the Serpent" (1929)
Context: The men on the Dauntless have disliked the Sea Girl's crew ever since our skipper took their captain to a cleaning on the wharfs of Zanzibar--them being narrow-minded that way. They claimed that the old man had a knuckle-duster on his right, which is ridiculous and a dirty lie. He had it on his left.

Lie