Quotes about seep (41 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Grey dawn was seeping into the sick room [around Christmas 1867, Munch was almost dying then and spitting blood when he was 13; but he recovered]. I lay in the middle of the bed with my hands outside the bedclothes, looking straight ahead. Now I was in a pact with God. I had promised to serve him if I survived, if he allowed me to escape the tuberculosis. Now I could never be as before.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

T 2771, as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 26
after 1930

God , Christmas

“Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders. … The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

As quoted in The Guardian [London] (14 June 1989)
Post-presidency (1989–2004)

Age

“Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book Middlesex

Source: Middlesex

Heart

“As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

“Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Truth , Way

“Stephanie could see the greed seep into the watery eyes of her
father’s other brother, a horrible little man called Fergus, as he
nodded sadly and spoke sombrely and pocketed the silverware
when he thought no one was looking”

Derek Landy Skulduggery Pleasant

Source: Skulduggery Pleasant

“the redness had seeped from the day and night was arranging herself around us. Cooling things down, staining and dyeing the evening purple and blue black.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Night

“I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.”

Marya Hornbacher (1974) American journalist

Source: Madness: A Bipolar Life

“These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power to impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can't be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. … Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

describing his experiment with mescaline, p. 26
The Doors of Perception (1954)

World , Beauty , Past , Personality

“When you notice light seeping into your coffin, it's hard to go on pretending that you're still dead.”

John Burdett book Bangkok Haunts

Bangkok Haunts (2007).

Light , Dead

“Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling at this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won't do−just to start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that's what I'll do-.”

Jack Kerouac book The Subterraneans

Source: The Subterraneans (1958), Chapter One

Truth , Confidence , Intelligence , Nature

“Humans are an embarrassing species w/ small glimmers of beauty that seep through the veil of bigotry&stupidity, every once in a small while.”

Frances Bean Cobain (1992) American artist

17 June 2014 https://twitter.com/alka_seltzer666/status/479082538904723457
Twitter https://twitter.com/alka_seltzer666 posts

Stupidity , Beauty

“Grimaldi and a sixteen-year-old girl still at Hollywood High. He was a good journalist but he was going to die soon. At fifty he was on a bottle and a half of Californian brandy a day and four packs of Lucky Strike. His clothes smelt as though they were seeped in tobacco juice. His white forlock was stained with it…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

Girl , Clothes

“… only a fraction of book learning will seep into practical life anyhow; and the more foolish the theory, the less of it.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

Source: On War (1832), Book 6, Chapter 17.

Life , Books , Learning

“These ruinous days of Autumn. At dusk,
the brightness seeps through the crumbling air,
at dusk the air gathers up the brightness”

Edward Hirsch (1950)

'The Renunciation of Poetry'

Autumn

“So to sleep on the sleeping porch required preparation. First, you put on long underwear, pajamas, jeans, a sweatshirt, your grandfather’s old cardigan and bathrobe, two pairs of woolen socks on your feet and another on your hands, and a hat with earflaps tied beneath the chin. Then you climbed into bed and were immediately covered with a dozen bed blankets, three horse blankets, all the household overcoats, a canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I’m not sure that they didn’t lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to hold everything down. It was like sleeping under a dead horse. For the first minute or so it was unimaginably cold, shockingly cold, but gradually your body heat seeped in and you became warm and happy in a way you would not have believed possible only a minute or two before. It was bliss. Or at least it was until you moved a muscle. The warmth, you discovered, extended only to the edge of your skin and not a micron farther. There wasn’t any possibility of shifting positions. If you so much as flexed a finger or bent a knee, it was like plunging them into liquid nitrogen.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), p. 140

Way , Sleep , Horse , Dead

“During the last quarter of a century all the authority associated with the function of spiritual guidance … has seeped down into the lowest publications. … Between a poem by Valéry and an advertisement for a beauty cream promising a rich marriage to anyone who used it there was at no point a breach of continuity. So as a result of literature’s spiritual usurpation a beauty cream advertisement possessed, in the eyes of little village girls, the authority that was formerly attached to the words of priests.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

“Morality and literature,” p. 164
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)

Marriage , Beauty , Girl , Literature

“His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

White Teeth (2000)

Passion

“The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

God , Knowledge , Heart

“I am very happy and thankful to be 'here' [Switzerland] and to remain. Here I can at least work a little on my good days, and be at peace among these simple, kindly people. In this solitude I have fought my way through to the possibility of continuing to live, even suffering so much. My time for circuses, 'cocottes' and company is over [referring to his wild 'Brücke'-years in Berlin]. I made what I could out of it, and I do not think it had been done in that way before. Otherwise there is nothing to link me with those 'événements'. During my 7 years in Berlin I let the whole essence of that kind of thing seep into me so thoroughly that I now know it back to front, and can leave it. Now I have other tasks, and they lie here… I cannot go down again into the throng. I am more than ever afraid of crowds. But more still, my work here is only at the beginning of its possibilities.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Quote in a letter to architect Henry van de Velde, from Frauenkirch, 5 July 1919; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 224-225
1916 - 1919

People , Lie , Peace , Way

“Silence lay like a white shroud over all. Kane wrenched his dirk clear and a trickle of seeping blood followed sluggishly, then ceased. The Puritan mechanically swished the blade through the air to shake off the red drops which clung to the steel, and as it flashed in the lanthorn light, it seemed to Jack Hollinster to glitter like a blue flame—a flame which had been quenched in scarlet.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Blue Flame of Vengeance" (1968)

Light , Silence

“Finally I just had to get out. Because when that fantasy seeps into the reality, she just becomes an incredibly ugly person. She feels she can distort anything that occurs for whatever purpose she wants. Whatever she feels, that’s what is, as far as she’s concerned.”

Samuel R. Delany book Triton

Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 7 “Tiresias Descending, or Trouble on Triton” (p. 322)

Feeling , Reality , Personality

“Nobody has ever thought himself to death. The chief danger confronting us is not age. It is laziness, sloth, routine, stupidity, — forcing their way in like wind through the shutters, seeping into the cellar like swamp water.”

Gilbert Highet (1906–1978) British academic

The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning (1976)

Death , Age , Stupidity , Way

“Spend all your time waiting
For that second chance,
For a break that would make it OK.
There's always some reason
To feel not good enough;
And it's hard at the end of the day.I need some distraction,
Oh, beautiful release.
Memory seeps through my veins.
Let me be empty,
Oh weightless and maybe
I'll find some peace tonight.”

Sarah McLachlan (1968) Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter

Angel
Song lyrics, Surfacing (1997)

Peace , Beauty , Feeling , Memory

“Day after day gasped away, slowly seep hours when fettered or immured, only at times does imagination scale the palisades that the spirit of chaos and confusion, the spirit of reactionary bombast, has set up around us - dreams, dreams of endless, destructive hate! Mists of hate, beclouding the burning brain!”

George Grosz (1893–1959) German artist

Letter to Otto Schmalhausen, 4 April, 1917 (Briefe, p. 49); as quoted in 'Portfolios', Alexander Dückers; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, p. 89 - note 62
George Grosz was early January 1917 recalled into the German army, only to be transferred shortly afterward to Gorden mental hospital near Brandenburg. From there he wrote this letter. At the end of April 1917 he was sent home, and on 20 May he was discharged on grounds of 'permanent unfitness for duty'

Hate , Dreams , Imagination , Time

“The Idealization of deep flaws seeping through coiled cracks;
The reality we all want to avoid is a plagued sickness we choose to live with.”

Frances Bean Cobain (1992) American artist

2 January 2015 https://twitter.com/alka_seltzer666/status/551059369576521728
Twitter https://twitter.com/alka_seltzer666 posts

Reality

“Intellectuals still argue whether Amerika is a fascist country. This concern is typical of the Amerikan left’s flight from reality. … This is actually a manifestation of the authoritarian process seeping into its own psyche.”

George Jackson (activist) (1941–1971) activist, Marxist, author, member of the Black Panther Party, and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family

Source: Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 120

Reality , Country

“He is walking up an incline. There are tracks below him and the slow clatter of a freight, the hiss of an engine. At the top of a hill he stops to look back. He can see nothing but fog spaced with a file of blurred archlights. Then he walks on, taking pleasure in breathing, in the beat of his blood, in the tread of his feet on the pavement, between rows of otherworldly frame houses. Gradually the fog thins, a morning pearliness is seeping in from somewhere. Sunrise finds him walking along a cement road between dumping grounds full of smoking rubbishpiles. The sun shines redly through the mist on rusty donkey-engines, skeleton trucks, wishbones of Fords, shapeless masses of corroding metal. Jimmy walks fast to get out of the smell. He is hungry; his shoes are beginning to raise blisters on his big toes. At a cross-road where the warning light still winks and winks, is a gasoline station, opposite it the Lightning Bug lunchwagon. Carefully he spends his last quarter on breakfast. That leaves him three cents for good luck, or bad luck for that matter. A huge furniture truck, shiny and yellow, has drawn up outside.
"Say will you give me a lift?" he asks the redhaired man at the wheel.
"How fur ye goin?"
"I dunno.... Pretty far."”

John Dos Passos book Manhattan Transfer

Source: Manhattan Transfer (1925), pp. 403-404

Bad luck , Pleasure , Shoe , Light

“It is true of opinions as of other compositions that those who are seeped in them, whose ears are sensitive to literary nuances, whose antennae record subtle silences, can gather from their contents meaning beyond the words. All this presupposes, of course, a grasp of the nature of the Supreme Court's functions — the scope and limits of its constitutional authority — and often, as well, familiarity with the record and briefs of a particular case whose opinion record and briefs of a particular case whose opinion is under scrutiny.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

"'The Administrative Side' of Chief Justice Hughes", 63 Harvard Law Review 1, 2 (1949).
Other writings

Nature , Silence

“The past is pervasive; it seeps into everything;… And yet because the past is irreplaceable and cannot be done again, it was that very past, not the present or the future, that was so delicate, so vulnerable, so dreadfully easy to erase.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

Past , Future

“Peter sighed. He turned the palms of his hands up as though to guess at rain. Anna knew him, theme and choreography. The sunshiny spring afternoon seeped through his fingers. He looked up at the witnessing heavens to keep what he could. He dropped his arms and let the rest go.”

Grace Paley (1922–2007) American writer and activist

"The Pale Pink Roast" (1959)

Spring

“Camel caravans bear
witness guns to Caesar.
Hordes crawl and seep inside
the walls. The streets
flow stone. Life goes
on absorbing war. Violence
kills the temple of no sex.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

The Lords and the New Creatures: Poems (1969), The New Creatures

Life , War , Sex

“He heard them whispering—whispering… The independence seeped out of him and he walked the streets alone, afraid of men's cynical eyes and the incessant hiss of whispering.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 32

Men

“And yet it is hard to believe that anything
in nature could stand revealed as solid matter.
The lightning of heaven goes through the walls of houses,
like shouts and speech; iron glows white in fire;
red-hot rocks are shattered by savage steam;
hard gold is softened and melted down by heat;
chilly brass, defeated by heat, turns liquid;
heat seeps through silver, so does piercing cold;
by custom raising the cup, we feel them both
as water is poured in, drop by drop, above.”
Etsi difficiile esse videtur credere quicquam in rebus solido reperiri corpore posse. transit enim fulmen caeli per saepta domorum, clamor ut ad voces; flamen candescit in igni dissiliuntque ferre ferventi saxa vapore. tum labefactatus rigor auri solvitur aestu; tum glacies aeris flamma devicta liquescit; permanat calor argentum penetraleque frigus quando utrumque manu retinentes pocula rite sensimus infuso lympharum rore superne.

Lucretius (-94–-55 BC) Roman poet and philosopher

Book I, lines 487–496 (Frank O. Copley)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

Feeling , Nature , Water , Housing

“By actions which compel general attention, the new idea seeps into people's minds and wins converts. One such act may, in a few days, make more propaganda than thousands of pamphlets.
Above all, it awakens the spirit of revolt: it breeds daring.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

The Spirit of Revolt (1880)
Context: Whoever has a slight knowledge of history and a fairly clear head knows perfectly well from the beginning that theoretical propaganda for revolution will necessarily express itself in action long before the theoreticians have decided that the moment to act has come. Nevertheless, the cautious theoreticians are angry at these madmen, they excommunicate them, they anathematize them. But the madmen win sympathy, the mass of the people secretly applaud their courage, and they find imitators. In proportion as the pioneers go to fill the jails and the penal colonies, others continue their work; acts of illegal protest, of revolt, of vengeance, multiply.
Indifference from this point on is impossible. Those who at the beginning never so much as asked what the "madmen" wanted, are compelled to think about them, to discuss their ideas, to take sides for or against. By actions which compel general attention, the new idea seeps into people's minds and wins converts. One such act may, in a few days, make more propaganda than thousands of pamphlets.
Above all, it awakens the spirit of revolt: it breeds daring. The old order, supported by the police, the magistrates, the gendarmes and the soldiers, appeared unshakable, like the old fortress of the Bastille, which also appeared impregnable to the eyes of the unarmed people gathered beneath its high walls equipped with loaded cannon. But soon it became apparent that the established order has not the force one had supposed.

People , Idea

“I believe it’s something that happens when one is around art, and when one is close to books: they seep into your system, into your blood, and start to activate something in your life. We start living in the way that some of these characters live, with some sense of their sensibility. It’s almost as if the reader becomes the writer and the writer becomes the reader…”

Nilo Cruz (1960) American playwright

On how a written work may speak to you in “Nilo Cruz by Emily Mann” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/nilo-cruz/ in BOMB Magazine (2004 Jan 1)

Art , Books , Sense , Way

“All the tolerance of persecution that has seeped into the Jewish character — the adaptability, the patience, the resignation, the silence, the self-denial — must be squeezed out, until the only response there is to any restriction of liberties is "No, I refuse."”

Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist

Writing About Jews (1963)

Patience , Silence , Self-confidence

“It is only in the cracks of division that corruption can seep in and pollution can spew out.”

Jerome Foster II (2002)

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/9/20/youth_climate_lawsuit_juliana_v_united#transcript https://www.democracynow.org/2019/9/20/youth_climate_lawsuit_juliana_v_united#transcript DemocracyNow (20 September 2019)

“I have pointed out already how ideas seep down to wider and commoner levels of intelligence and feeling until at last they are believed to be solid realities.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 7, p. 159

Intelligence , Idea , Reality , Feeling

“We tend quite rightly to associate an age with its newest and most original ideas, and there is no harm in this as long as we remember that only a few men, at that time, may have actually held those ideas, and that many decades, often amounting to centuries, may pass before those ideas have seeped down to wider and commoner levels of belief, thought, and feeling.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 6, p. 140

Time , Age , Idea , Feeling

“The atmosphere of desperate, ignorant terror essential to healthy rumors seeps away, replaced by a silent, wary paranoia. People bunker down, jealously keeping what they know, which is nothing, to themselves.”

Max Barry book Company

Source: Company (2006), p. 174

People