Gesture Quotes (page 8)
I wasn't able to think about them directly or summon them up in any conscious way, but as I put together their puzzles and played with their Lego pieces, building evermore complex and baroque structures, I felt that I was temporarily inhabiting them again--carrying on their little phantom lives for them by repeating the gestures they had made when they still had bodies.
Paul Auster
When we both experienced the love that consumes, we shared in the Absolute. The Absolute shows each of us who we really are; it is an enormous web of cause and effect, where every small gesture made by one person affects the life of someone else. This morning, that slice of the Absolute was still very much alive in my soul. I was seeing not only you but everything there is in the world, unlimited by space or time.
Paulo Coelho
Let me tell you this, when social workers offer you, free, gratis and for nothing, something to hinder you from swooning, which with them is an obsession, it is useless to recoil, they will pursue you to the ends of the earth, the vomitory in their hands. The Salvation Army is no better. Against the charitable gesture there is no defence, that I know of. You sink your head, you put out your hands all trembling and twined together and you say, Thank you, thank you lady, thank you kind lady. To...
Samuel Beckett
Love, love, love? all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.
Germaine Greer
During discussions in his office, Bradlee frequently picked up an undersize sponge-rubber basketball from the table and tossed it toward a hoop attached by suction cups to the picture window. The gesture was indicative both of the editor's short attention span and of a studied informality. There was an alluring combination of aristocrat and commoner about Bradlee: Boston Brahmin, Harvard, the World War II Navy, press attach at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, police-beat reporter, news-magazine...
Carl Bernstein
Suddenly he thought he saw a trait of soul-less habit in her dear coarse face, something mechanical and unmysterious in her friendly smile, something unworthy of him. His gesture froze in mid-air; the smile froze on his face. Was he still in love with her, did he really still desire her? No, he had been there too often. All too often he had seen this selfsame smile and smiled back without a prompting from his heart. What had still been all right yesterday was suddenly no longer possible today.
Herman Hesse
It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection. It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to...
Arundhati Roy
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
Philip Larkin
I awaited Signor Polizzi's reply with ill-contained impatience. I could not even remain quiet; I would make sudden nervous gestures - open books and violent close them again. One day I happened to upset a book with my elbow - a volume of Morri. Hamilcar, who was washing himself, suddenly stopped, and looked angrily at me, with his paw over his ear. Was this the tumultuous existence he must expect under my roof? Had there not been a tacit understanding between us that we should live a peaceful...
Anatole France
Yet it is true that there was an absent mindedness about her which sometimes made her clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she should have been thinking of taffeta; her walk was a little too much of a stride for a woman, perhaps, and her gestures, being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion.
Virginia Woolf