Gesture Quotes (page 3)
![Oscar Wilde quote: "Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil, cried Dorian..."](/pic/370532/600x316/quotation-oscar-wilde-each-of-us-has-heaven-and-hell-in-him-basil-cried.jpg)
Modern poets like Frost still want to make 'deep' statements; but they are also more sceptical of such high-sounding generalities than many of their forebears. So, rather like T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, they gesture enigmatically to such profundities while at the same time being nervous of committing themselves to them.
Terry Eagleton
None of us should be ashamed to speak of our class power or lack of it. Overcoming fear, even the fear of being immodest, and acting courageously to bring issues of class- especially radical standpoints – into the discourse of blackness is a gesture of militant defiance, one that runs counter to bourgeois insistence that we think of “money” in particular and class in general as private matters.
Bell Hooks
![James Joyce quote: "But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were..."](/pic/368361/600x316/quotation-james-joyce-but-my-body-was-like-a-harp-and-her-words-and.jpg)
Peri went to the window, gesturing out at the dragons, perched and flying, everywhere. "Safe, true, but how boring! How confining! How sad! How could that compare with this? And what is safe? You were not safe on your little farm. War came to you and took all your safety away! If I am to be in this world, I want more than to be a hound upon the game board, tucked away in a corner until the jackals come and sweep all away!
Mercedes Lackey
Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me. But a shift has occurred since I stepped up to take Prim's place, and now it seems I have become someone precious. At first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out to me. It is an old and rarely used gesture of our district, occasionally seen at funerals. It means...
Suzanne Collins
wholly to be a foolwhile Spring is in the worldmy blood approves, and kisses are a better fatethan wisdomlady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry-the best gesture of my brain is less thanyour eyelid's flutter which sayswe are for each other: thenlaugh, leaning back in my armsfor life's not a paragraph. And death i think is no parenthesis
E. E. Cummings
I am late,' she said, 'I know that I am late. So many little things have to be done when you are alone, and I am not yet accustomed to being alone,' she added with a pretty little sob which reminded me of a cut-glass Victorian tear-bottle. She took off thick winter gloves with a wringing gesture which made me think of handkerchiefs wet with grief, and her hands looked suddenly small and useless and vulnerable.
Graham Greene
Most of the low latticed windows were innocent of blinds, and to the lookers-in from outside, the inmates, gathered round the tea-table, absorbed in handiwork, or talking with laughter or gesture, had each that happy grace which is the last thing the skilled actor shall capture? the natural grace which goes with perfect unconsciousness of observation. Moving at will from one theater to another, the two spectators, so far from home themselves, had something of wistfulness in their eyes...
Kenneth Grahame
Suddenly the memory of his wife came back to him and, no doubt feeling it would be too complicated to try to understand how he could have yielded to an impulse of happiness at such a time, he confined himself, in a habitual gesture of his whenever a difficult question came to his mind, to passing his hand over his forehead, wiping his eyes and the lenses of his lorgnon. Yet he could not be consoled for the death of his wife, but, during the two years he survived her, would say to my...
Marcel Proust
Mrs. Breedlove considered herself an upright and Christian woman, burdened with a no-count man, whom God wanted her to punish. (Cholly was beyond redemption, of course, and redemption was hardly the point - Mrs. Breedlove was not interested in Christ the Redeemer, but rather Christ the Judge.) Often she could be heard discoursing with Jesus about Cholly, pleading with Him to help her "strike the bastard down from his pea-knuckle of pride." And once when a drunken gesture catapulted Cholly...
Toni Morrison