Quotes about wrist

A collection of quotes on the topic of wrist, hand, handful, likeness.

Quotes about wrist

“Percy, let me go" she croaked. "You can't pull me up."
His face was white with effort. She could see in his eyes that he knew it was hopeless.
"Never," he said. He looked up at Nico, fifteen feet above.
"The other side, Nico! We'll see you there. Understand?"
Nico's eyes widened. "But-"
"Lead them!" Percy shouted. "Promise me!"
"I-I will."
Below them, the voice laughed in the darkness. Sacrifices. Beautiful sacrifices to wake the goddess.
Percy tightened his grip on Annabeth's wrist. His face was gaunt, scraped and bloody, his hair dusted with cobwebs, but when he locked eyes with her, she thought he had never looked more handsome.
"We're staying together," he promised. "You're not getting away from me. Never again."
Only then did she understand what would happen. A one-way trip. A very hard fall.
"As long as we're together," she said.
She heard Nico and Hazel still screaming for help. She saw sunlight far, far above- maybe the last sunlight she would ever see.
Then Percy let go of his ledge, and together, holding hands, he and Annabeth fell into the endless darkness.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Beauty, Way, Understanding, Effort

“I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.”

Julian Barnes book The Sense of an Ending

Source: The Sense of an Ending

Memory, Time, Personality

“He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pnin

Source: Pnin

Sleep, Night

“What does “A. D.” signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that. Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?”

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) American writer

Cold Turkey (2004)

People, Way, Imagination, Personality

“Suppose two sisters who are twins and who are equally beautiful, walk down a street. One of them is wearing the Islamic Hijab i.e. the complete body is covered except for the face and the hands up to the wrists, and the other twin is wearing a mini skirt or shorts. Around the corner there is a hooligan who is waiting for an opportunity to tease a girl. Who will he tease? The girl wearing the Islamic Hijab or the girl wearing the mini skirt or shorts? Dresses that expose more than they conceal, are an indirect temptation to the opposite sex for teasing, molestation and rape. The Qur’an rightly says that the hijab prevents women from being molested.”

Zakir Naik (1965) Islamic televangelist

In Most Common Questions Asked by the non-Muslims https://www.amazon.com/Most-Common-Questions-Asked-Muslims/dp/9675699299 p: 46

Women, Beauty, Sex, Girl

“he begged. she demanded to know. A hand suddenly gripped his wrist.
He wondered if the hold came from the realms of the gods. But he didn't care. All he knew was what the Goddess was whispering to him”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Quintana of Charyn

God

“Reacher said, "So here's the thing Brett. Either you take your hand off my chest, or I'll take it off your wrist.”

Lee Child book Worth Dying For

Source: Worth Dying For

“Holy water at my wrists and behind my ears; my version of Eau de Don'tbiteme”

Karen Marie Moning book Darkfever

Source: Darkfever

Water

“Then forget Gabriel. Is there a particular reason you keep biting vampires?"

Will touched the dried blood on his wrists, and smiled. "They don't expect it.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Smile, Forgetting

“Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes…”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Mr. Lockwood (Ch. III).
Source: Wuthering Heights (1847)
Context: As it spoke I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes: still it wailed, "Let me in!", and maintained its tenacious grip, almost maddening me with fear.

“Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?"

I didn't say anything.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

Life

“Where are we going?” Annabelle asked, resisting his hold on her wrist.
“To the house. If they’re not willing to be witnesses, then it seems I’ll have to debauch you in front of someone else.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Secrets of a Summer Night

Housing

“By the time Alec came back into the training room, Jace was lying on the floor, envisioning lines of dancing girls in an effort to ignore the pain in his wrists. It wasn’t working.
~pg. 317~”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Pain, Girl, Lying, Effort

“That was all he said, except for "Aaaeerrgghhh." Which is not really a word. But the reason that he screamed "Aaaeerrgghhh" was that Franco had bitten him savegly on the wrist.”

Eoin Colfer book The Wish List

Source: The Wish List

“Maybe wrist corsages cut off circulation to the brain? I mean, is that why so many girls do stupid things on prom night? I was really going to have to investigate this further, I decided”

Ally Carter I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Source: I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Stupidity, Girl, Night

“And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: Blue Iris: Poems and Essays

Life, Money, Truth

“yes, Wagner and the storm intermix with the wine as nights like this run up my wrists and up into my head and back down into the gut”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

Wine, Night

“Curran struck at my wrist. His fingers were cat-quick, but I had spent my life honing my reflexes, and he missed.
“Well, look at that.” I studied my free wrist. “Denied. Good-bye”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Strikes

Life, Cats, Study

“Speaking of death, LeBlanc boasted he could kill me in the waiting room. I broke his wrist. He wasn't impressed.”

Kelley Armstrong book Bitten

Source: Bitten

Death, Waiting

“I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

Suicide, Help, Hurt, Drawing

“Tessa touched his wrist lightly with her hand. "Be brave," she said. "It's not a duck, is it?”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

“We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

Imagination

“The world is like a broken wrist that healed the wrong way, and will never be the same again.”

Frances Hardinge book Fly by Night

Source: Fly by Night

World, Way

“Are you still mad because i broke your phone" Jace said. "Because you broke my wrist, so i'd said we're even"
"It was sprained," Alec said. "Not broken, sprained”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Madness

“Connor smiles with mocking warmth at him, and glances at the tattoo on his wrist. "I like your dolphin.”

Neal Shusterman book Unwind

Source: Unwind

Smile, Tattoo

“I stopped. She was bleeding after all. Perfect lines crossed her wrists, not near any crucial veins, but enough to leave wet red tracks across her skin. She hadn; t hit her veins when she did this; death hadn't been her goal.”

Richelle Mead Vampire Academy

Source: Vampire Academy

Death, Perfection

“He caught her by the wrist, brought her hand to his bare chest. Splayed her fingers over his heart. It beat against her palm, like a fist punching its way through his sternum. 'Break my heart,' he said. 'Break it in pieces. I give you permission.”

Cassandra Clare book Lord of Shadows

Source: Lord of Shadows

Way, Heart

“Have you made any plans?
Take an overdose, slash my wrists then hang myself.
All those things together?
It couldn't possibly be misconstrued as a cry for help.”

Sarah Kane book 4.48 Psychosis

Source: 4.48 Psychosis

Help, Cry

“My mom had a soft heart after all! Instead of being chained by both wrists, we were only chained by one ankle!
I mean, if I’d been looking for proof that she really did love me, this was it, right?”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Love, Moms, Heart

“What else is there to do in college except drink beer or slit one's wrists?”

Bret Easton Ellis The Rules of Attraction

Source: The Rules of Attraction

Drink, Beer

“He was still stroking the inside of her wrist, his touch doing odd delicious things to her skin and nerves.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

“You sound as if you don't mind what happens to it," said Tessa. "Won't you miss it here? This place has been your home."
His fingers stroked her wrist lightly, making her shiver.
"You are home for me now.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Home

“All I see are ankles and wrists--and FYI, you're pulling a Mileyfrickin'-Cyrus with that belly flash. Not attractive.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Unleashed

“I held her
wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred,
centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and
sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted.
there was no creature living as foul as I
and all my poems were
false.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Learning, Falseness

“Scars crossed her welded wrists.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

“She kissed me, author of The Little Dog Laughed. Then she took my wrist with her two hands. She pressed her lips into the palm of my hand. She placed my hand upon her bosom between her breasts. She turned her lips toward my face and waited. And Arturo Bandini, the great author dipped deep into his colorful imagination, romantic Arturo Bandini, just chock-full of clever phrases, and he said, weakly, kittenishly, "Hello."”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Dogs, Color, Imagination, Kiss

“I can write no more today. The contemplation of my sorry state has reduced me to so deep a melancholy that I contemplate opening my wrist like Petronius Arbiter and lapsing quietly into oblivion. Unlike Petronius, however, I shall have neither the sound of music nor the gentle talk of friends. I still have time to choose a better moment — besides, who knows to what nightmares I might awake.”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

Last lines which West had written for his unfinished work The Last Confession, about the last days of Giordano Bruno.
The Last Confession (2000)

Music, Time

“I was playing drums, and I had broken my wrist very bad playing football, and the bass player in the band… he wanted to split. So I just went to the bass; I went from Drums over to Bass. That was it. I was playing the bass within a week.”

Jaco Pastorius (1951–1987) Musician, producer, educator

On how he switched from drums to bass
Modern Electric Bass, Jaco Pastorius (1985)

Football

“I put a What Would Jesus Do bracelet on my Jewish friend's wrist and it burned his skin. He threw it on the ground, it turned into a serpent, we both started laughing. We left it there, we hate snakes. We think they're slimy, even though we know they're not.”

Daniel Tosh (1975) American stand-up comedian

Completely Serious (2007)

Hate, Thinking

“Just pop it on your wrist. - Ricky asks Karl how his 'invention' of a watch that counts down your life would actually work.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast Series 1 Episode 5
On Technology

Life

“I'd written personal essays before, but never on this scale -- never so often and with such, er, honesty. (If by honesty I mean slashing my wrists and hemorrhaging all over the computer screen).”

Ayelet Waldman (1964) American- Israeli writer

Blog post http://bad-mother.blogspot.com/2005/02/end.html<br>Regarding blogging

Personality

“When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies. But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 12

Secret, Flowers, Lying, Sleep

“I cannot keep a clock or a watch. They stop on me. Why won't time stay peacefully on my wrist? Is time not interested in me any more because I am dying?”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Dear Boullée

Time

“Trump (Donald) denied knowing that Serge (Kovaleski) was disabled, and demanded an apology, saying that anyone could see his imitation was of a flustered, frightened reporter, not a disabled person. It’s true that Trump was not mimicking any mannerisms that Serge has. He doesn’t jerk around or flail his arms. He’s not retarded. He sits calmly, but if you look at his wrists, you’ll see they are curved in. That’s not the imitation Trump was doing—he was doing a standard retard, waving his arms and sounding stupid: “’Ahhh, I don’t know what I said—ahhh, I don’t remember!’ He’s going, ‘Ahhh, I don’t remember, maybe that’s what I said!’””

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2016, In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! (2016)

Stupidity, Jerk, Personality

“If I could I would kiss his wrists.
If I had half the courage to face his pain.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

"A Man of Forty" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-man-of-forty/ <br class="br">Drinking the Moon (2006)

Pain, Courage, Kiss

“That pile of paper on his left side went on living like the watch on a dead soldier’s wrist.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

On his visit to the deathbed of Marcel Proust, as quoted in "Cocteau: The Great Enchanter" by Edmund White Vogue (May 1984)

Dead

“I've always wanted a suitcase handcuffed to my wrist… Alright.”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Strategic Grill Locations

“There, strapped like a watch on my wrist
That's finished with gold but can't tell time,
Was all of what little pleasure exists
Seductively sold and uselessly mine.”

Aaron Weiss

Nice and Blue, Pt 2.
Brother, Sister (2006)

Pleasure, Time

“That very night while gentle sleep
The urchin's eyelids kissed,
Two stern-faced men set out from Lynn,
Through the cold and heavy mist;
And Eugene Aram walked between,
With gyves upon his wrist.”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

1840s, The Dream of Eugene Aram

Men, Kiss, Sleep, Night

“Where does the hand become the wrist?
where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed
and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that
razor's edge
between something and nothing, between
one and the other.”

Simon Armitage (1963) Poet, playwright, novelist

'Gooseberry Season', from Kid.

“Since 1929 I have suffered from an extremely painful disease [arthritis deformans] which gets worse every year. Little by little my arms and hands have become stiff and bent and I have terrible pain. This stiffness in my elbows and wrists has tremendously hindered my painting and I have had to find a new technique. My art in the last period has all been in small format, but my paintings have become even deeper and more spiritual..”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

from: 'Lebenserinnerungen', 1938
Source: 1936 - 1941, Life Memories' (1938), p. 23

Pain, Disease, Art, Suffering

“Winning the lottery is like slipping your hand into the bra of the most beautiful woman in the world, then getting it stuck and having to saw it off at the wrist.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Source: Fullyramblomatic Novels, Articulate Jim: A Search For Something, Chapter Eight

World, Beauty

“A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it as well - she did this and then she did that; there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

Quote by Barbara Rose, in Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1975, p. 85
1970s - 1980s

Beauty, Art, Thinking, Effort

“Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.”

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

Additional Poems, No. 18, st. 1 (1937).

“I don't believe that the average fellow has anything like a true line on the value of wrist action in hitting anything—a baseball, a golf ball, a tennis ball or a polo ball. If you watch most of them, you will see they are trying to hit with their bodies, with their shoulders, with their arms—with almost everything except their wrists. I think it comes because most of them are overanxious, all tied up, too tense. They start by gripping too tightly. That kills off the hands and wrists. Their wrists get locked and then they have to swing their shoulders and bodies in. You'd be surprised how far a fellow can hit a ball, using only his wrists. I know I've been caught off guard or out of position on a sharp breaking curve, have had to slap at the ball, using only my wrists and have now and then watched it sail over the fence. The wrist is the mainspring—both wrists in baseball and golf. If you get them to work the rest is fairly easy. If you don't get them to work you are not going to do any good hitting. You can't get any speed in closing a door if the hinges are rusty and won't work. Hack Wilson must have great wrist action, for no short, stocky guy is going to hit that many home runs without a lot of it.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

As quoted in "The Sportlight" by Grantland Rice, in The Baltimore Sun (August 22, 1930), p. 13

Guy, Home, Thinking, Speed

“Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

An American Childhood (1987)

Water

“When I was your age, my grandfather bought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked the jeweler to make it that way. Its size was supposed to be a symbol of his love. More rubies, more love. But I could not wear it comfortably. I could not wear it at all. So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say. If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 79

Love, Age, Way

“I carried this rubber ball with me all the time. I squeezed it to strengthen my fingers and wrists and my friend and I would walk to and from school throwing the rubber ball back and forth. Many times at night, I laid in the bed and threw the ball against the ceiling and caught it. Baseball was my whole life. I would forget to eat because of baseball and one time my mother wanted to punish me. She started to burn my bat, but I got it out of the fire and saved it. Many times today she tells me how wrong she was and how right I was to want to play baseball. I bought my parents their home in Puerto Rico and gave them possessions they never thought they’d ever see. All from baseball.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in “Clouter Clemente: Popular Buc; Rifle-Armed Flyhawk Aims At Second Bat Crown”
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1964</big>

Life, School, Home, Parent

“Dealing w/ Hamas is like dealing w/ a crazy woman who's trying to kill u - u can only hold her wrists so long before you have to slap her”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Tweet https://twitter.com/billmaher/statuses/489930991956262913 (17 July 2014)

“I wanted to kill myself. I would have done it, too, if I had owned a gun. I was considering the gruesome alternatives — pills, slitting my wrists with a razor blade, jumping off a bridge — when another student called to ask me a detailed question on relativity. There was no way, after fifteen minutes of thinking about Mr. Einstein, that suicide was still a viable option. Divorce, certainly. Celibacy, highly likely. But death was out of the question. I could never have prematurely terminated my love affair with physics.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

"Richard Wakefield" in Rama II (1989)
1980s

Love, Death, Way, Question

“Normally, in February, in Boston and in most of the country, the weather is gray, rainy, gray, sleet, snow, gray; every day it just gets grayer and grayer and grayer! You wake up one day and you go 'I'm not coming into work today!' Your boss goes, 'Why not? You sick?' 'No! Its too gray!' Then you wake up and its the grayest day you've ever seen! And the next day it's even grayer! And that's usually Valentine's Day, and that's the day you look at your wrists and go, 'Hey, maybe I should slit 'em to see color!”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

The White Album (2000)

Color, Weather, Country

“But me they'll lash me in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease this darbies at the wrist, and roll me over fair,
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.”

Herman Melville book Billy Budd, Sailor

Source: Billy Budd, the Sailor (1891), Ch. 30, Billy in the Darbies

Dreams, Feeling

“How shall I a habit break?
As you did that habit make.
As you gathered, you must lose;
As you yielded, now refuse.
Thread by thread the strands we twist
Till they bind us, neck and wrist.
Thread by thread the patient hand
Must untwine, ere free we stand.
As we builded, stone by stoene,
We must toil, unhelped, alone,
Till the wall is overthrown.”

John Boyle O'Reilly (1844–1890) Irish-born poet and novelist

A Builder's Lesson.

“When we've got these people who have practically limitless powers within a society, if they get a pass without so much as a slap on the wrist, what example does that set for the next group of officials that come into power? To push the lines a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further, and we'll realize that we're no longer citizens - we're subjects.”

Edward Snowden (1983) American whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWBQGVc2kq8&t=58m19s
2013

People

“… my mother will settle on the rug and unclip the bellows, pulling and pushing them with a mild aquatic motion with her left hand, the fingers of the right hand flowering upon the keys, the wedding-bangle suspended around her wrist. Each time the bellows are pushed, the round holes on the back open and close like eyes. Without the body music is not possible; it provides the hollow space for resonance as does the curved wooden box of the violin or the round urn of the sitar. At the moment of singing, breath tips in the swelling diaphragm as water does in a pitcher. The voice-box itself is a microscopic harp, its cords tautening and relaxing with each inflection.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Afternoon Raag (1993)

Music, Flowers, Wedding, Water

“During my high school years, a boy from my neighborhood named Malcolm chose me to be his friend for a season. His elbow nudged my book in the public library one Saturday afternoon as he sprawled forward across the table feigning some condition—boredom, I suppose. His voice was like shadow—as whispery and as indistinct as shadow, due to an adolescent change. “Do you want to wrestle?” he asked. I have never met anyone since who speaks as Malcolm spoke: He daydreamed; he pronounced strategies out loud (as I raked elm leaves from our lawn and piled them in the curb)—about how he would befriend this boy or that boy, never anyone I knew; Malcolm went to a different high school. “First,” he said, “I will tease him about his freckles. Then I will tease him about his laugh—how his laugh sounds a little like a whinny sometimes. I won’t go too far. You should see how his wrist pivots as he dribbles down the court. “He’s got these little curls above his sideburns. I wish I had those.””

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

(He would catch me up on the way to the library.) “What are you reading? We read that last year. Not really a war story, though, is it? Want to go eat French toast?”
Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

War, Books, School, Way

“O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

As I Walked Out One Evening (1937)

Water, Tea, Dead

“Guessing what the pitcher is going to throw is 80 percent of being a successful hitter. The other 20 percent is just execution. The mental aspects of hitting were especially important to me. I was strictly a guess hitter, which meant I had to have a thorough knowledge of every pitcher I came up against and develop a strategy for hitting him. My method was to identify the pitches a certain pitcher had and eliminate all but one or two and then wait for them. One advantage I had was quick wrists. Another advantage—and one that all good hitters have—was my eyesight. Sometimes I could read the pitcher's grip on the ball before he ever released it and be able to tell what pitch he was throwing. I never worried about the fastball. They couldn't throw it past me, none of them.”

Hank Aaron (1934) Retired American baseball player

From I Had a Hammer (1990) by Aaron, with Lonnie Wheeler; as reproduced in Hank Aaron https://books.google.com/books?id=tcPC-qgM8McC&pg=PA48&lpg=PA48&dq=%22Guessing+what+the+pitcher+is+going+to+throw+is+80+percent+of+being+a+successful+hitter.+The+other+20+percent+is+just+execution.%22&source=bl&ots=QZ81enT7WV&sig=NL9G0fGgcTJGfc6oVOYvuzBV2sI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQu9DFxcjVAhUEwYMKHdamDmsQ6AEIOzAE#v=onepage&q=%22Guessing%20what%20the%20pitcher%20is%20going%20to%20throw%20is%2080%20percent%20of%20being%20a%20successful%20hitter.%20The%20other%2020%20percent%20is%20just%20execution.%22&f=false (2007) by Jamie Poolos, p. 48

Knowledge, Waiting, Reading, Success

“it is true that you may fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all the time, but you can not fool all of the people all the time… dogs, on the other hand, with them all you need to do is flick your wrist and they run off looking for some stupid tennis ball.”

Darby Conley (1970) American cartoonist

famous cat quotes
Bucky Katt's Big Book of fun, page 114
Bucky Katt

People, Stupidity, Dogs, Fools

“The joy of life is living it, or so it seems to me;
In finding shackles on your wrists, then struggling till you're free;
In seeing wrongs and righting them, in dreaming splendid dreams,
Then toiling till the vision is as real as moving streams.
The happiest mortal on the earth is he who ends his day
By leaving better than he found to bloom along the way.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Improvement, stanza 1.
Just Folks (1917)

Life, Dreams, Way, Joy

“Are you hungry?
Are you sick?
Are you begging for a break?
Are you sweet?
Are you fresh?
Are you strung up by the wrists?”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

"We Suck Young Blood"
Lyrics, Hail to the Thief (2003)

“I could feel the golden handcuffs of a comfortable but unfulfilling life snapping shut on my wrists.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Page 119
2000s, (2008)

Life, Feeling

“The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired someone to pick up the socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the place down. Michelangelo would have been distressed by its proportions, which were neither lofty nor shaped by any noticeable inner harmony or symmetry, other than that all parts of the room were pretty much equally full of old coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays, most of which were now sharing their tasks with each other. The walls were painted in almost precisely that shade of green which Raffaello Sanzio would have bitten off his own right hand at the wrist rather than use, and Hercules, on seeing the room, would probably have returned half an hour later armed with a navigable river. It was, in short, a dump, and was likely to remain so for as long as it remained in the custody of Mr Svlad, or 'Dirk', Gently, né Cjelli.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 3

Shoe, Soul, Coffee, Parting

“Cherry: …Yeah he’s gone anyhow, going into overtime. Gretzky, verge of elimination. So, what do we do? They say ‘What do we do? How about he [Doug Gilmour] gets hit with the puck? He gets hit with the puck, he’s laying on the [sic]'. The only way he’d get hit with the puck is if his chin was on the ice. Anyway, that’s all I’ve got to say about that. [Gretzky] gets the overtime winner and that’s wrong as far as I’m concerned. Andreychuk got a five-minute major, he [Gretzky] should’ve got something! At least a slap on the wrist or a dirty look!”

Don Cherry (1934) ice hockey coach, television commentator

On the May 29, 1993 edition of <i>Coach's Corner</i> discussing the alleged non-call by referee Kerry Fraser of a high-stick by Los Angeles Kings captain Wayne Gretzky on Toronto Maple Leafs forward Doug Gilmour in overtime of Game 6 of the 1993 Campbell Conference Final.

Way

“I've explored a variety of directions and themes over the years. But I think in my painting you can see the signature of one artist, the work of one wrist.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

Quote from Abstract Expressionism, Barbara Hess, Taschen Köln, 2006, p. 15
1990s - 2000s

Thinking, Painting

“Finally, law enforcement needs to increase the consequences for kids found intoxicated or in possession of drugs. The current slap on the wrist leaves kids with the idea "Cops are cool. When they take our drugs they are going to use them to get high. They are really helping us avoid the silly law.”

Virgil Miller Newton (1938) American priest

Miller Newton (1983). The Teenage Drug Epidemic, El Paso Physician, vol 6, pp. 5-6.
On Teenage Drug Use

Law, Idea, Help

“Jordan tattoos the words "forgive me" in thick black letters down the inside of his arm so that when he looks at his wrist he will remember not to hate himself so much. What he keeps forgetting is that there is life after survival.”

Buddy Wakefield (1974) American poet

Human the Death Dance
Poetry

Life, Hate, Forgiveness, Tattoo

“Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle, on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair—holding his wrists like Lifar—and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Poetry, Unlimited”, p. 159
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Life, God, Art, Thinking

“Then Thursday Coyle had his left wrist tied to his right ankle and was still beating this new kid Stockhausen until Schtitt sent Tex Watson down to tell him to knock it off.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest (1996)

“Going to tell you something, Hank. Hand me that bat. Now I'm going to show you the whole secret of how I hit those home runs. Only fellow I ever told it to was Lou Gehrig, when poor Lou first came up to the Yanks and Miller Huggins was trying to make a left-field hitter out of him. Look. See how this grip makes your wrist break at the right moment? Throws the whole weight of the bat into the ball. With this grip, you've just got to follow through. I kept it a secret a long time.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

Speaking with Hank Greenberg on Sunday, February 23, 1947; as quoted in "Tips From the Bambino: Ruth Reveals Hitting Secret to Greenberg; Convalescing Babe Congratulates Hank On Decision to Play" by Bob Considine (INS), in The Philadelphia Inquirer (February 25, 1947)

Secret, Home, Time

“When I see bad-looking bikers with black leather studs on their wrists hanging out at the Oregon Country Fair, I take it as a sign of health. No, I don’t want them hanging around, but trying to eliminate them all, arrest them all, legislate against them all — that’s evil.”

Ken Kesey (1935–2001) novelist

The Paris Review interview (1994)
Context: When I see bad-looking bikers with black leather studs on their wrists hanging out at the Oregon Country Fair, I take it as a sign of health. No, I don’t want them hanging around, but trying to eliminate them all, arrest them all, legislate against them all — that’s evil. I have asked feminists, If you could, would you eliminate all male chauvinist pigs? If you could come up with some kind of spray to spray in the air and do away with them, would you? Would you do away with all scorpions and rattlesnakes, mosquitoes? Mosquitoes are part of the ecosystem. So are male chauvinist pigs. You’ve got to fight them, but you don’t try to exterminate them. A purifying group or system that would eliminate them all — that would be an evil force. Anytime you have a force that comes along and says, We will eradicate these people, you have evil. Looking back in history, what has seemed the worst turns out not to be the worst.

Health, Evil, Country

“Here life is, moves; faintly. A wrist. The faint throb of blood, precise, miraculous . . .”

E.E. Cummings Him

Him (1927)
Context: Here life is, moves; faintly. A wrist. The faint throb of blood, precise, miraculous... And they talk of dying! The blood delicately descending and ascending: making an arm. Being an arm. The warm flesh, the dim slender flesh filled with life, slenderer than a miracle, frailer... These are the shoulders through which fell the world. The dangerous shoulders of Eve, in god's entire garden newly strolling.

Life

“The next time you look into the mirror, just look at the way the ears rest next to the head; look at the way the hairline grows; think of all the little bones in your wrist. It is a miracle. And the dance is a celebration of that miracle.”

Martha Graham (1894–1991) American dancer and choreographer

I Am A Dancer (1952)
Variant: Think of the magic of that foot, comparatively small, upon which your whole weight rests. It's a miracle, and the dance is a celebration of that miracle.

Way, Thinking, Time, Dance

“Fingers of steel. Wrist of silk.”

Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) Polish composer

“As it spoke I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes: still it wailed, "Let me in!", and maintained its tenacious grip, almost maddening me with fear.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Mr. Lockwood (Ch. III).
Wuthering Heights (1847)

Fear, Clothes

“Here life is, moves; faintly. A wrist. The faint throb of blood, precise, miraculous... And they talk of dying! The blood delicately descending and ascending: making an arm. Being an arm. The warm flesh, the dim slender flesh filled with life, slenderer than a miracle, frailer... These are the shoulders through which fell the world. The dangerous shoulders of Eve, in god's entire garden newly strolling.”

E.E. Cummings Him

Him (1927)

Life, God, World, Making love

“The perception is that new equipment can make a diver relatively safe. I know people with the fanciest equipment including their “wrist watch”, but they are not necessarily good divers. There is a great gap between diver ability and equipment.”

Zale Parry (1933) American scuba diver and actress

People