Quotes about stain (248 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I do not need your red sculpted lips,
Nor hair in loops like a serpent’s coils,
Nor a nape as graceful as a swan’s,
Nor narcissus eyes full of drunkenness,
Nor teeth as perfect as pearls of heaven,
Nor cheeks ruddy and full as pomegranates,
Nor a voice mellifluous as a sarinda,
Nor a figure as elegant as a poplar,
But show me just this one thing, my love,
I seek a heart stained like a poppy flower – Pearls by millions I would gladly cede,
For the sake of tears borne of love and grief.”

Ghani Khan (1914–1996) Pakistani poet

na may sta da nari shundi dy pakar
na da zulfi wal pa wal laka khamar
na da bati pashan danga ghari ghwaram
nargasay stargy na daki da khumar
na ghakhuna dy laluna da adan
na nangy dak sara sara laka anar
na pasti da sarindy pa shan khabari
na wajood laka da saar way mazadar
khu bas yow shai rata ra ukhaya dilbara
da lala pashan zargy ghawaram daghdar
yow dawa ukhaqi chi da ghum ao muhabat way
lakuno laluna dy karam zaar
Entreaty (1929)

Love , Flowers , Tear , Heart

“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926–2004) American psychiatrist

As quoted in The Leader's Digest : Timeless Principles for Team and Organization (2003) by Jim Clemmer, p. 84

Beauty , People , Beauty , Light

“As he came into the window
It was the sound of a crescendo
He came in her apartment
He left the blood stains on the carpet
She ran underneath the table
He could see she was unable
So she ran into the bedroom
She was struck down, it was her doom.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

Bad (1987)

“Confession cleans the sinner's soul, it doesn't help the victim. Our whole church is in need of forgiveness. Where is our humility? Sin is a wound, not a stain. It needs to be treated, healed. Forgiveness is not enough.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

Forgiveness , Soul , Help

“Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his Notebooks: “It should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places in which … you may find really marvelous ideas.”

C.G. Jung book Man and His Symbols

Source: Man and His Symbols

Idea

“In this world
love has no color
yet how deeply
my body
is stained by yours.”

Izumi Shikibu Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan

Source: Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan

Love , World , Color

“Razors pain you,
Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you,
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful,
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful.
You might as well live.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: Enough Rope

Pain , Law

“… and when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them "Will you take my heart-- stains and all?" and they say "I will," and they ask you the same question and you say, "I will," too.”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Source: Microserfs

Love , Question , Heart

“I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me anymore.”

Jimmy Swaggart (1935) pastor, musician, teacher, television host, televangelist

Source: Address to his congregation (21 February 1988), as quoted in The New Encyclopedia of American Scandal (2001) by George C. Kohn, p. 365

God , Sea , Forgetting

“Yes; the stain rests upon the flesh-eaters, not upon the flesh providers!”

Hereward Carrington (1880–1958) Jersey parapsychologist

Source: The Natural Food for Man, p. 162

“where the Gauls stealthily, at the time of night when sleep falls on men, attacked the high citadel and of a sudden stained with blood walls and watchers.”
Qua Galli furtim noctu summa arcis adorti moenia concubia vigilesque repente cruentant.

Ennius (-239–-169 BC) Roman writer

As quoted by Macrobius in Saturnalia, Book I, Chapter IV (tr. J. Elliott)

Men , Sleep , Time , Night

“Sir,
Would you allow me, grateful as I am for the kind reception you once extended to me, to show my concern about maintaining your well-deserved prestige and to point out that your star which, until now, has shone so brightly, risks being dimmed by the most shameful and indelible of stains?”

Emile Zola J’accuse…!

J'accuse! (1898)

Star

“Dirty, stained, withered, broken things seem beautiful to me.”

Yohji Yamamoto (1943) Japanese fashion designer

Kiyokazu Washida. The Past, the Feminine, the Vain in Talking to Myself (2002), Ch. 3: Feedom or the Vain.

Beauty

“I believe in this tragic hour you can make the right choice. The honor and glory of Russian men of arms shall not be stained with the blood of the people.”

Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) 1st President of Russia and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR

Appeal to the military to not participate in the coup attempt. (19 August 1991)
1990s

Men , People

“It is not without reason that this verse [Ps 70:1] has been chosen from the whole of Scripture as a device. It carries within it all the feelings of which human nature is capable…. 'Come to my help, O God; Lord, hurry to my rescue'…. The thought of this verse should be turning unceasingly in your heart. Never cease to recite it in whatever task or service or journey you find yourself. Think upon it as you sleep, as you eat, as you submit to the most basic demands of nature. This heartfelt thought will prove to be a formula of salvation for you. Not only will it protect you against all devilish attack, but it will purify you from the stain of all earthly sin, and will lead you on to the contemplation of the unseen and the heavenly and to that fiery urgency of prayer which is indescribable and which is experienced by very few. Sleep should come upon you as you meditate on this verse until as a result of your habit of resorting to its words you get in the habit of repeating them even in your slumbers.”

John Cassian (360–435) Christian monk and theologian

Conferences X

God , Feeling , Nature , Thinking

“No doubt, there was peace after all this, but it was a peace stained with blood.”
Pacem sine dubio post haec, verum cruentam.

Tacitus book Annals

Book I, 10; Church-Brodribb translation
Annals (117)

Peace

“The man raised himself, fell down, and rose again. The wound that he had under his armor of filth was staining the ground, and when he had spoken, his wide-open eyes looked down at all the blood he had given for the healing of the world.”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn

World

“The document they produced was eventually signed, but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggles, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience, and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2008, A More Perfect Union (March 2008)

Women , Men , War , People

“Be happy, be happy; you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart's-blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover, for Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty.”

Oscar Wilde book The Happy Prince and Other Tales

"The Nightingale and the Rose"
The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)

Love , Music , Lovers , Heart

“You know that feeling you get / You feel you're older than time?
Do you keep the receipts for the friends that you buy?
And I hope you know / That it won't let go / It sticks around with you until the day you die.
I hope the tears don't stain the world that waits outside.”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Where Did It All Go Wrong?
Standing on the Shoulder of Giants (2000)

World , Hope , Feeling , Tear

“There is something whereby each broken thing is bound again and every stain made clean.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Source: One Minute Nonsense (1992), p. 169
Context: "My life is like shattered glass." said the visitor. "My soul is tainted with evil. Is there any hope for me?
"Yes," said the Master. "There is something whereby each broken thing is bound again and every stain made clean."
"What?"
"Forgiveness"
"Whom do I forgive?"
"Everyone: Life, God, your neighbor — especially yourself."
"How is that done?"
"By understanding that no one is to blame," said the Master. "NO ONE."

“No, you do not elevate aberration into an ideal, and illusion is always a stain, whatever the name you lend it.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face
Context: By what right does carnal love say, "I am your hearts and minds as well, and we are indissoluble, and I sweep all along with my strokes of glory and defeat; I am Love!"? It is not true, it is not true. Only by violence does it seize the whole of thought; and the poets and lovers, equally ignorant and dazzled, dress it up in a grandeur and profundity which it has not. The heart is strong and beautiful, but it is mad and it is a liar. Moist lips in transfigured faces murmur, "It's grand to be mad!" No, you do not elevate aberration into an ideal, and illusion is always a stain, whatever the name you lend it.

“If we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.
It was not in our national interest to let that happen. I refused to let that happen.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2011, Address on interventions in Libya (March 2011)
Context: If we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.
It was not in our national interest to let that happen. I refused to let that happen. And so nine days ago, after consulting the bipartisan leadership of Congress, I authorized military action to stop the killing and enforce U. N. Security Council Resolution 1973.

World , Suffering , Waiting

“Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Wine , Weather

“It's one of the things that makes us different than they are, Harry. The blood on their hands does not make it right to bloody my own. My choices are measured against my own soul. Not against the stains on theirs.”

Jim Butcher book Death Masks

Source: Death Masks

Soul

“It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn't even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.”

Elena Ferrante book The Days of Abandonment

Source: The Days of Abandonment

Past

“A lie preserved in stained glass doesn't make it more true.”

Saul Williams (1972) American singer, musician, poet, writer, and actor

Source: The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-Hop

Lie

“I looked at the stained-glass image of the lamb in the window above me, but that only reminded me that lambs are famous for being led to slaughter, or sometimes hanging out with lions in ill-advised relationships.”

Maureen Johnson (1973) writer from the USA

Source: The Name of the Star

“Oh, dear me." Nathalie sank back down in the chair and examined her Uggs. "The sarcasm could've started dripping off her and stained the floor. "Is it conspiracy, treachery, murder, or open warfare? I'll have to choose my lipstick accordingly.”

Lilith Saintcrow (1976) American writer

Source: Defiance

“… nothing could eclipse the stain of his dirty, mortal mediocrity.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

“Death isn't enough. It doesn't remove the stain. But a slap, a whiplash, square on the face, does. Because a man's face is as sacred as his mother or his wife.”

Mario Vargas Llosa book The War of the End of the World

Source: The War of the End of the World

Death

“Lying on stained wretched sheets with the bleeding virgin,
we could plan a murder…or start a religion.”

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

Source: An American Prayer (1978)

Religion , Lying

“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

“Dakota's head was stuck in his toga. He staggered around olike a Kool-Aid-stained ghost.
"Um," Percy said, "should I wear my bed sheets?”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

“there is moss on the walls
and the stain of thought and failure and
waiting”

Charles Bukowski book The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Failure , Waiting

“That is the curse of lying, Sister. Once you place that crown of the liar upon your head, you can take it off again, but it leaves a stain for all time.”

Terry Goodkind book Soul of the Fire

Source: Soul of the Fire

Lying , Sister , Time

“There were some people who hit your life so hard, they left a stain on your future.”

Jodi Picoult book The Tenth Circle

Source: The Tenth Circle

Life , People , Future

“Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: “People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

People , Beauty , Light , Sun

“Enjoy him while it lasts," I called. "Apparently he has Girlfriend ADD."

She looked away, but not before I caught the blush staining her cheeks.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Through the Zombie Glass

“Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."
… On the other hand, he SAID it.”

Art Spiegelman (1948) cartoonist from the United States

Source: Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began

Silence

“A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.”

Raymond Chandler book Farewell, My Lovely

Source: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), chapter 13

“If Bacchus ever had a color he could claim for his own, it should surely be the shade of tannin on drunken lips, of John Keat's 'purple-stained mouth', or perhaps even of Homer's dangerously wine-dark sea.”

Victoria Finlay (1964) British journalist

Color , Wine , Sea

“Some stains don't come out.”

Stephen King book Pet Sematary

Morality
Pet Sematary (1983)
Variant: Some things it don't pay to be curious about.

“I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

Stupidity , Way

“Beneath the stains of time the feeling disappears, you are someone else I am still right here.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

Source: Johnny Cash Quotes

Feeling , Time

“Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.”

Edith Wharton book The House of Mirth

Source: The House of Mirth

“I was stained by failure.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Purple Hibiscus

Source: Purple Hibiscus

Failure

“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

“There in that pool stained with green blood, he had learned two things: one was that all the pain stopped when you stopped fighting death; and the other was that as long as you could still hear your heart beating, you had to keep fighting back.”

Ryū Murakami book Coin Locker Babies

Source: Coin Locker Babies

Death , Pain , Learning , Heart

“Sitting here with one's knitting, one just sees the facts.

-"The Blood-Stained Pavement”

Agatha Christie book The Thirteen Problems

Source: The Thirteen Problems

“Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions, inside the walls of a hospital… Doubt is like dye. Once is spreads into the fabric of excuses you've woven, you'll never get rid of the stain.”

Jodi Picoult book Lone Wolf

Source: Lone Wolf

Lie , Hope , Reality

“My mother moves so fast I do not even see it coming. But she slaps my face hard enough to make my head snap backward. She leaves a print that stains me long after it’s faded. Just so you know: shame is five-fingered.”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

“The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.”

Anaïs Nin book House of Incest

Source: House of Incest

Mood

“I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Beer , Cry

“I try to fill the emptiness deep inside me with Cheetos, but I am still depressed. Only now my fingers are stained orange. I am blue. And I am orange.”

Karen Salmansohn American writer

“Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.”

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) English poet and soldier (1893-1918)

Source: The Poems Of Wilfred Owen

Kiss , Dead

“He was dirty, his hair unkempt, his clothes stained with blood. Heroes in stories somehow managed to rescue maidens while looking like court dandies. Next time he went adventuring he'd remember to bring a comb.”

J.V. Jones The Book of Words

Source: The Book of Words

Time , Clothes

“The worst thing about all this staining power of the world is the way in which we come to think of it as inevitable. … It is not true. … Social life is lighted up with the lustre of the white, unstained robes of many a pure man or woman who walks through its very midst.”

Phillips Brooks (1835–1893) American clergyman and author

"Unspotted from the World"

Life , World , Way , Thinking

“Love is a universal migraine.
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"Symptoms of Love," lines 1-3, from More Poems (1961).
Poems

Love , Universe

“On a bough,
The only one chained by the honeysuckle,
Sat two white Doves, upon each neck a tint
Like the rose-stain within the delicate shell
Of the sea-pearl, as Love breathed on their plumes.
And each was mirror'd in the other's eyes,
Floating and dark, a paradise of passion.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(10th May 1823) Poetical Catalogue of Paintings - Two Doves in a Grove. Mr. Glover's Exhibition.
24th May 1823) Inez see The Improvisatrice (1824
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Love , Passion , Sea

“My difficulty with working class writers is that they don't make the working class come alive—Leslie Halward is an exception, but as you imply he is not very important. They give me information and they give their comrades gratification, but that's all; gloom, indignation, aspiration in plenty, and plenty of stains on the tablecloth and coal-dust in the mine—but no living beings to experience them.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Letter 350, to John Lehmann, 21 December 1940
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“The first night, a rock, big as two fists.
The second, a rock big as three.
But nary a curse cursed Rudolph Reed.
(Though oaken as man could be.)
The third night, a silvery ring of glass.
Patience arched to endure,
But he looked, and lo! small Mabel's blood
Was staining her gaze so pure.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

Patience , Night

“So, there was a girl.
What I’ve guessed, and what the history books imply, is that she was unlucky enough to have been sired by a cruel man. He beat both wife and daughter and abused them in other ways. Bright Itempas is called, among other things, the god of justice. Perhaps that was why He responded when she came into His temple, her heart full of unchildlike rage.
“I want him to die,” she said (or so I imagine). “Please Great Lord, make him die.”
You know the truth now about Itempas. He is a god of warmth and light, which we think of as pleasant, gentle things. I once thought of Him that way, too. But warmth uncooled burns; light undimmed can hurt even my blind eyes. I should have realized. We should all have realized. He was never what we wanted Him to be.
So when the girl begged the Bright Lord to murder her father, He said, “Kill him yourself.” And He gifted her with a knife perfectly suited to her small, weak child’s hands.
She took the knife home and used it that very night. The next day, she came back to the Bright Lord, her hands and soul stained red, happy for the first time in her short life. “I will love you forever,” she declared. And He, for a rare once, found Himself impressed by mortal will.
Or so I imagine.
The child was mad, of course. Later events proved this. But it makes sense to me that this madness, not mere religious devotion, would appeal most to the Bright Lord. Her love was unconditional, her purpose undiluted by such paltry considerations as conscience or doubt. It seems like Him, I think, to value that kind of purity of purpose—even though, like warmth and light, too much love is never a good thing.”

N. K. Jemisin book The Broken Kingdoms

Source: The Broken Kingdoms (2011), Chapter 11 “Possession” (watercolor) (pp. 202-203)

Love , Life , God , Truth

“There is blood in my veins
That has run clear of the stain
Contracted in so many loins.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"Here"
Tares (1961)

“When I am dead, no pageant train
Shall waste their sorrows at my bier,
Nor worthless pomp of homage vain
Stain it with hypocritic tear.”

Edward Everett (1794–1865) American politician, orator, statesman

"The Dirge of Alaric, the Visigoth" In The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal Vol. V, No. 25 (January-June 1823), p. 64.

Tear , Training , Dead

“I have seen the sunset, stained with mystic horrors,
Illumine the rolling waves with long purple forms,
Like actors in ancient plays.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

J'ai vu le soleil bas, taché d'horreurs mystiques,
Illuminant de longs figements violets,
Pareils à des acteurs de drames très-antiques.
St. 9
Le Bateau Ivre http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Boat.html (The Drunken Boat) (1871)

“Like is he to a wolf that has forced an entrance to a rich fold of sheep, and now, his breast all clotted with foul corruption and his gaping bristly mouth unsightly with blood-stained wool, hies him from the pens, turning this way and that his troubled gaze, should the angry shepherds find out their loss and follow in pursuit, and flees all conscious of his bold deed.”
Ille velut pecoris lupus expugnator opimi, pectora tabenti sanie grauis hirtaque saetis ora cruentata deformis hiantia lana, decedit stabulis huc illuc turbida versans lumina, si duri comperta clade sequantur pastores, magnique fugit non inscius ausi.

Statius book Thebaid

Source: Thebaid, Book IV, Line 363 (tr. J. H. Mozley)

Way , Wolf , Loss

“We, too, must enter into the Saviour's sorrow. For us, if we believe in Him, He breaks the bread, and pours the wine: and when we eat and drink, we do show the Lord's death until He come. His death, not His life, though that was lustrous with a holiness without the shadow of a stain. His death, not His teaching, though that embodied the fullness of a wisdom that was Divine. His death, not His miracles, though His course was a march of mercy, and in His track of blessing the world rejoiced and was glad. His death! His body not glorious, but broken; His blood, not coursing through the veins of a conqueror, but shed, poured out for man. His death! Still His death! Grandest and most consecrating memory both for earth and heaven!”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 373.

Life , Death , Wisdom , World

“The virus was not helping. He had hoped that it would, but the feelings it brought were too superficial. When he most needed their succour he could feel them for the paper-thin façades they were. Just because the virus was tickling the parts of his brain that produced feelings of religious experience didn’t mean he was able to turn off the other parts of his mind that recognised these feelings as having been induced artificially. He truly felt himself to be in the presence of something sacred, but he also knew, with total clarity, that this was due to neuroanatomy. Nothing was really with him: the organ music, the stained-glass windows in the sky, the sense of proximity to something huge and timeless and infinitely compassionate were all explicable in terms of neural wiring, firing potentials, synaptic gaps.”

Alastair Reynolds book Absolution Gap

Source: Absolution Gap (2003), Chapter 9 (p. 136)

Hope , Music , Feeling , Sense

“If, when Christ was on his way to Calvary, some brave soul had rescued him from the pious mob, he would not only have been damned for his pains, but would have rendered impossible the salvation of any human being. The Christian world has been trying for nearly two thousand years to explain the atonement, and every effort has ended in an admission that it cannot be understood, and a declaration that it must be believed. Has the promise and hope of forgiveness ever prevented the commission of a sin? Can men be made better by being taught that sin gives happiness here; that to live a virtuous life is to bear a cross; that men can repent between the last sin and the last breath; and that repentance washes every stain of the soul away?”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Some Reasons Why (1881)

Life , Men , Pain , World

“If the whiteness they pursue is cool and haughty and blank,
history is uncool, reaches out gawkily for affinities, asserts itself boldly,
threatens to mark, to break through and stain the primed white canvas
that is their life.
For, having primed it, they do not know where to start,
how to make a mark. They are alone in the world, a small new
island of whiteness. Or so they think; they do not know, or perhaps
they do not want to know, that the neighbourhood is full of people
like them. Thus they are steeped in its silence.”

Zoë Wicomb (1948) South African author resident in Scotland

Playing in the Light (2006)

Life , People , World , History

“Standing in the market square, so alive but void of life, We work and we sweat and we struggle through each day. As our efforts scar our hands, this world stains us with demands. It’s hard to see life’s humour in the business games we play. As we gnaw our nails with stress, our fists and hearts pound so carelessly. With every effort forward, how much more can we digress?”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"The Prophet's Hands"
The Prophet's Hands (2003)

Life , World , Game , Business

“There are no honest goods to buy or to sell; adulterated foods, shoddy manufacture of all that we wear, the underpaid labor and consumed life that make every garment a texture of falsehood, the hideous competitive war that slays its millions where swords and cannons slay their tens, all unite to baffle and mock the efforts of the awakened conscience at every turn, and make the industrial system seem like the triumph of hell and madness on the earth. Only by a sort of terrible daily denial of his spiritual self, a crucifixion of the principles by which he longs to organize his life, can a man wrest a stained and insecure livelihood from this terrible war for bread which we call industry.”

George D. Herron (1862–1925) American clergyman, writer and activist

Source: Between Caesar and Jesus (1899), p. 26-27

Life , War , Food , Hell

“His eyes
All radiant with glad surprise,
Looked forward through the Centuries
And saw the seeds which sages cast
In the world’s soil in cycles past
Spring up and blossom at the last;
Saw how the souls of men had grown,
And where the scythes of Truth had mown
Clear space for Liberty’s white throne;
Saw how, by sorrow tried and proved,
The blackening stains had been removed
Forever from the land he loved;
Saw Treason crushed and Freedom crowned,
And clamorous Faction, gagged and bound,
Gasping its life out on the ground.”

Richard Realf (1832–1878) American poet

Apocalypse.

Love , Life , Men , Truth

“Oil-for-food shows the need for reform. There was fraud, corruption, mismanagement. I come as an advocate of a strong United Nations. If you believe in reform, it’s going to be very hard if the guy leading the charge is stained.”

Norm Coleman (1949) American politician

Commenting on a a scathing report on Kofi Annan’s oversight of the Iraq oil-for-food program. Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2005/sep/9/20050909-115404-7805r/?page=all (September 9, 2005).

Food , Guy , Fraud , Strong

“I breathe in the full scent of her. If it ends tomorrow or in eighty years, I could breathe her for the rest of my life. But I want more. I need more. I tilt her slender jaw up with my hand so that she's looking at me. I was going to say something important. Something memorable. But I've forgotten it in her eyes. That gulf that divided us is still there, filled with questions and recrimination and guilt, but that's only part of love, part of being human. Everything is cracked, everything is stained except the fragile moments that hang crystalline in time and make life worth living.”

Pierce Brown book Morning Star

Source: Morning Star (2016), Ch. 56: In Time

Love , Life , Question , Time

“Good governance is also about rooting out corruption, which is a stain on the integrity of any nation.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Excerpts from a speech to the Association of Development Financing Institutions in Asia and the Pacific, 13 May 2005

“Sharpe's sword was lucky. There was a soldier's goddess and her name was Fate and she had liked the sword Harper made for Sharpe. The Kligenthal was stained with the blood of friends, with the torture of flayed priests, and the beautiful sword contained not luck, but evil.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Narrator, p. 312
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Sword (1983)

Fate , Beauty , Evil

“Everything had been new and strange : the lean and ragged foot-soldiers who marched alongside of us, toughened, stained and blasés after months of service; the turmoil of encampment in the dark, with the shrill yells of black drivers, and the hassle and crush of crowding wagons, the twinkle of hosts of camp-fires, and the hot glow of a distant veldt-fire; and, finally the ghostly ride of two miles to water the horses….”

Robert Erskine Childers (1870–1922) Irish nationalist and author

"The H.A.C. in South Africa", by Erskine Childers and Basil Williams, Smith & Elder, (London, 1903), p. 72.
Literary Years and War (1900-1918)

Water , Distant , Horse

“How has the church in every age, when in authority, defended itself? Always by a statute against blasphemy, against argument, against free speech. And there never was such a statute that did not stain the book that it was in and that did not certify to the savagery of the men who passed it.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Men , Books , Age

“Whatever I do, whichever way I turn, I can neither feed nor clothe my family, nor take part in public affairs as a citizen, nor speak the truth as I conceive it, without being stained with the blood of my brothers and sisters; without putting my hands into the wickedness that prostitutes every sacred national and religious function.”

George D. Herron (1862–1925) American clergyman, writer and activist

Source: Between Caesar and Jesus (1899), p. 24

Truth , Family , Way , Sister

“Like gay-hued leaves after an autumn storm, the fallen littered the plain; the sinking sun shimmered on burnished helmets, gilt-worked mail, silver breastplates, broken swords and the heavy regal folds of silken standards, overthrown in pools of curdling crimson. In silent heaps lay war-horses and their steel-clad riders, flowing manes and blowing plumes stained alike in the red tide. About them and among them, like the drift of a storm, were strewn slashed and trampled bodies in steel caps and leather jerkins…”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Scarlet Citadel" (1933)

War , Autumn , Sun , Horse

“Human artifacts are not stains imposed on nature. Such a view drives a wedge between humanity and the rest of the community of life. A golf ball is the manifestation of the mind of a clever, playful African primate. This primate loves to invent games to test its physical and mental skill. Generally, these games are played on carefully reconstructed replicas of the savanna from which the ape came and for which its subconscious still hankers. The clever primate belongs in this world. … To love nature and to hate humanity is illogical.”

David G. Haskell (1950) writer, Biologist

"August 8th — Earthstar," pages 157-158
The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature http://theforestunseen.com/ (2012)

Love , Life , Hate , World

“My work is in a complete transformation. Lately, in my studio in Amsterdam, 'beings' re-emerge more and more, but I have repainted all the canvases that I have brought with me [from Amsterdam to Paris]. It is matter itself. On the canvas, no discovery, no personal drama, no submission to a rhythm.... freed from 'Victory Boogiewoogie' [title of the last work of Piet Mondrian, 1944], bepop, bepop, we free ourselves from rhythm, we are not there yet, but it is coming... Now I paint stains, bigger stains, colours endlessly reapplied one upon the other, I scrape and I put down new stains of colour unto nothing remains but one great plane, concentrated and linked at the same time, suddenly a vivid red or yellow and the canvas and being merge.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Quote in a letter of Karel Appel from Paris to Aldo van Eyck, October 1950; as quoted in (MR1-85); Karel Appel, a gesture of colour, Jean-François Lyotard, (original French text of 1992 based upon intensive correspondence with Karel Appel), Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Herman Parret; University Press, Leuven, Belgium, 2009, p. 99

Time , Victory , Painting , Personality

“[L]ook at yourself right now… hoping to lose yourself—your home, your certainties, the borders and boundaries of your life—by means of a bundle of wood pulp, sewn and glued and stained with blobs of pigment and resin. People with Books.”

Michael Chabon book Gentlemen of the Road

… It makes me want to laugh.
Afterword
Gentlemen of the Road (2007)

Life , People , Books , Hope

“The Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, perhaps better known by its nickname “Gitmo,” is an affront to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the legacy of our national heritage. It should be closed now, and all the people detained there returned to the place where they were seized. In this I wholeheartedly endorse the view of my friend and fellow veteran R. J. Harris who says that Guantanamo is a stain on the U. S. and the U. S. military. Like R. J., I’m ashamed of our leadership for allowing it. The prison facility at Guantanamo Bay does more than just blur the line between the good guys and the bad guys; it erases the line entirely.”

R. Lee Wrights (1958–2017) American gubernatorial candidate

" Gitmo's Gotta Go http://www.libertyforall.net/?p=7236," Liberty For All (4 February 2012, retrieved 25 February 2012).
Republished http://original.antiwar.com/lee-wrights/2012/02/06/gitmos-gotta-go/ by Antiwar.com (7 February 2012).
2012

People , Guy

“In the part of the night where it's quietest, around three or four o'clock, I started wondering where this black man's soul had disappeared to as it left his body. His thoughts, impressions, memories, whatever: the background noise we all have in our head that stops us from forgetting we're alive. It had to go somewhere: it couldn't just vaporize—it must have gushed, trickled or dripped onto some surface, stained it somehow. Everything must leave some kind of mark.”

Tom McCarthy (writer) book Déjà vu

Source: Remainder (2005), Ch. 11.

Soul , Memory , Parting , Night

“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

“And then I saw the menu, stained with tea and beautifully written by a foreign hand, and on top it said…"Chips with everything". Chips with every damn thing. You breed babies and you eat chips with everything.”

Arnold Wesker Chips with Everything

Chips with Everything, Act 1 (1962)

Tea , Baby

“He has shown himself able to meet with calmness the great emergencies of the government. For twenty-five years he has trodden the perilous heights of public duty, and against all the shafts of malice has borne his breast unharmed. He has stood in the blaze of "that fierce light that beats against the throne"; but its fiercest ray has found no flaw in his armor, no stain upon his shield. I do not present him as a better Republican or a better man than thousands of others that we honor; but I present him for your deliberate and favorable consideration. I nominate John Sherman, of Ohio.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1880s, Speech Nominating John Sherman for President (1880)

Light

“O foul disgrace, of knighthood lasting stain,
By men of arms a helpless lady slain!”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Contra uma dama, ó peitos carniceiros,
Feros vos amostrais, e cavaleiros?
Stanza 130, lines 7–8 (tr. William Julius Mickle); the death of Inês de Castro.
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto III

Men

“The votaries of Pythagoras of Samos have this story to tell of him, that he was not an Ionian at all, but that, once on a time in Troy, he had been Euphorbus, and that he had come to life after death, but had died as the songs of Homer relate. And they say that he declined to wear apparel made from dead animal products and, to guard his purity, abstained from all flesh diet, and from the offering of animals in sacrifice. For that he would not stain the altars with blood; nay, rather the honey-cake and frankincense and the hymn of praise, these they say were the offerings made to the Gods by this man, who realized that they welcome such tribute more than they do the hecatombs note and the knife laid upon the sacrificial basket.”

Philostratus book Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Book 1, § 1.
Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Life , Death , God , Time

“That chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Volume iii, p. 332
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“Whether the nymph shall break Diana's law,
Or some frail China jar receive a flaw,
Or stain her honour, or her new brocade,
Forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade.”

Alexander Pope The Rape of the Lock

Canto II, line 105.
The Rape of the Lock (1712, revised 1714 and 1717)

Law , Forgetting

“There is rust in my mouth,
the stain of an old kiss.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

"The Lost Lie" from The Divorce Papers
45 Mercy Street (1976)

Kiss

“A man shows a narrowness of mind and becomes unworthy of his humanity by refusing any privilege to his fellow man because he is colored. Every prejudice entertained, every breach of justice and charity against a fellow-citizen because of color is a stain flung upon the banner of our liberty that floats over us.”

John Ireland (bishop) (1838–1918) Catholic bishop

Sermon at St. Augustine Catholic Church (1890)

Justice , Color

“It was a lovely morning. We have not had many lovely days. And the sun was just coming through the stained glass windows and falling on some flowers right across the church and it just occurred to me that this was the day I was meant not to see.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

TV Interview for Channel 4 A plus 4 (15 October 1984) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=105764, referring to the Brighton bombing in which the IRA attempted to assassinate her.
Second term as Prime Minister

Love , Flowers , Sun

“I had to go to the Bauhaus to the basic course that was given by Itten. And I submitted to that although I was a little older than Itten. But I have not the best memories of my studies there. So when that course was over everyone had to exhibit his work and then it was decided whether or not one could continue. I was accepted to continue. But I wanted to go into a workshop and I wanted to make stained glass. That was my old dream. Glass pictures. But Itten thought I was not ready for that. Certainly to delay my study in glass, Itten said, 'Glass painting is a branch of wall painting and you should go first to our wall painting workshop,' And I said, 'That's nonsense. Wall painting has to do with reflected light and glass painting with direct light.' So I said 'Sorry, I'll do my own stuff on my own.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

I had no money. Just a Rucksack and a hammer. And I started these assemblages. That was in 1921, But in all books on assemblages these things are not mentioned.
Homage to the square' (1964), Oral history interview with Josef Albers' (1968)

Money , Books , Dreams , Study

“O faithless brother what has happened that in vain you joined hands to violate my honour, and to stain your own hand with my blood. You gathered round yourself a band of persons addicted to vice … you excited this gang of villains to hate me … I appointed you to act for me. I ordered my friends to obey you … you are now out to destroy me. I was your guest you abused me. You swore at me in my face. That which you yourself deserved you ascribed to me. You inspired your servants with rancorous hatred of me. Even you taught your own barber your own falsehoods. He gave false evidence against the truth. You set in motion this great sedition …. Outwardly you pretended to be my friend. You attended my feast. You ate my meal of trust. Inwardly you manifested your falsehood until Shawal 23 [Presumably March 11, 1866] when I was keeping a fast you withheld bread and water from me. … By deceit you intercepted my epistles. Some of them which were to your advantage you paraded before the inhabitants of the city [i. e. Edirne]. At present am in straitened circumstances and you are in affluence. And yet you pretend the contrary.”

Subh-i-Azal (1831–1912) Persian religious leader

Quoted in Mirza Mustafa Katib's Response to Zayn al-Muqarrabin on page 46
Open Letter to Bahá'u'lláh

Hate , Truth , Water , Personality

“Among the reforms necessary for the triumph of true refinement and true morality, which ought to be our earnest aim, is the Dietetic one, which, if not the weightiest of all (allerwichtigste), yet, undoubtedly, is one of the weightiest. Still is the ‘civilised’ world stained and defiled by the remains of a horrible barbarity; while the old-world revolting practice of slaughter of animals and feeding on their corpses still is in so universal vogue, that men have not the faculty even of recognising it as such, as otherwise they would recognise it; and aversion from this horror provokes censure of such eccentricity, and amazement at any manifestation of tendency to reform, as at something absurd and ridiculous — nay, arouses even bitterness and hate. To extirpate this barbarism is a task, the accomplishment of which lies in the closest relationship with the most important principles of humaneness, morality, æsthetics, and physiology. A foundation for real culture — a thorough civilising and refining of humanity — is clearly impossible so long as an organised system of murder and of corpse-eating (organiserten Mord-und-Leichenfratz System) prevails by recognised custom.”

Georg Friedrich Daumer (1800–1875) German philosopher and poet

Quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating https://archive.org/stream/ethicsofdietcate00will/ethicsofdietcate00will#page/n3/mode/2up by Howard Williams (London: F. Pitman, 1883), p. 283.

Men , Hate , World , Universe