Searing Quotes

Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable - not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.... You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent - you learn, in a word, femininity. (Catharine MacKinnon)

Like me, he has a searing belief that books are sacred. They might not be to other people, but when you have a passion, you hold on to it. You defend it. You dont pretend it isn't important at the risk of offending others." -Carrie.

Candace Bushnell

At present, I am particularly excited by 'bad taste'. I have the deep feeling that there exists in the very essence of bad taste a power capable of creating those things situated far beyond what is traditionally termed 'The Work of Art'. I wish to play with human feeling, with its 'morbidity' in a cold and ferocious manner. Only very recently I have become a sort of gravedigger of art (oddly enough, I am using the very terms of my enemies). Some of my latest works have been coffins and tombs. During the same time I succeeded in painting with fire, using particularly powerful and searing gas flames, some of them measuring three to four meters high. I use these to bathe the surface of the painting in such a way that it registered the spontaneous trace of fire.

Yves Klein

Any last words?" Simon knew what he was supposed to say. Sh'ma Yisrael, adonai elohanu, adonai echod. Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. He tried to speak the words, but a searing pain burned his throat. "Clary.

Cassandra Clare

The last item-the occasional trip into realms labeled madness-can mean, especially if you are a writer, that you are given to telling the unvarnished, brutal, searing truth, whether society likes it or not. And not the Sylvia Plath look-at-me kinds of truth, but the spiritual-seer and mad-shaman types of truth, the truths that really hurt, the truths that get into society's craw and stick there, causing festering metaphysical sores indicative of social cancers or worse-but also the types of truth that speak to you deeply, authentically, radiantly, if you have the courage to listen.

Ken Wilber

As detailed in our searing report – also released by the Justice Department today – this investigation found a community that was deeply polarized; a community where deep distrust and hostility often characterized interactions between police and area residents.

Eric Holder

What was it that drove these thousands into the arms of his art - what but the blissfully sensuous, searing, sense-consuming, intoxicating, hypnotically caressing, heavily upholstered - in a word, the luxurious quality of his music?

Thomas Mann

I shut my eyes and clenched my hands behind me and saw, in lightning flashes, myself doing ferocious things, like pushing him down an endless flight of stairs, or dropping him without warning into a bottomless well, or stringing him up to a stout beam and leaving him to dangle, or - or other things of the sort; no guns, no knives, no baseball bats, nothing to cause outright bloodshed, just silent, grim, sudden murder by hand was my intention. All this was far beyond my bodily powers of course, and I like to believe beyond my criminal powers too. For I woke when we struck the searing hot light of the August morning as if I had come out of a nightmare, horrified at my own thoughts and feeling as if I had got some incurable wound to my very humanity - as indeed I had. However inflicted, a wound there was, with painful scar tissue, left upon my living self by that appalling event. My conscience stirs as if, in my impulse to do violence to my enemy, I had assisted at his crime.

Katherine Anne Porter

At the base of the plane, Styles freelance photographer is down on one knee, going handheld, still in the same Hawaiian shirt. The famously reclusive R. Vaughn Corliss is nowhere in view. Doug Llewellyn's wardrobe furnished by Hugo Boss. The Malina blanket for the artist's lap and thighs, however, is the last minute fix of a production oversight, retrieved from the car of an apprentice gaffer whose child is still nursing, and is not what anyone would call an appropriate color or design, and appears unbilled. There's also some eleventh hour complication involving the ground level camera and the problem of keeping the commode's special monitor out of its upward shot, since video capture of a camera's own monitor causes what is known in the industry as feedback glare - the artist in such a case would see, not his own emergent Victory, but a searing and amorphous light.

David Foster Wallace

The stars are silent. Voyager among dark harbors, I listen, but the midnight wind carries only the sound of trees and water lapping against the gunwale and the solitary cry of the night swallow. There is no dawn. No searing sun rises in east or west. The rocks over Calumal do not silver, and the great round world slides through the void.

Jack McDevitt

A man is entitled to only one great passion in a lifetime. Whether it's music or a profession or a woman, everything else pales in its afterglow. The searing shock so changes one's chemistry that if the object is lost, the experience can never be repeated. Only anticlimax remains. (Jack McDevitt)

Like all good friends, they hated seeing their relationship lose its emotional innocence, its chastity of good will, and now that the thing was lost, now that searing statements had changed hands and left scars, neither looked forward to the future.

James K. Morrow

Marriage requires searing honesty at all costs. I learned that from my third wife.

Alan Arkin

The attacks of September 11, 2001, were spectacular, riveting, grim, costly and searing. The shock that they caused reverberated throughout the world. What happened in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania ended the lives of thousands of people and changed the lives of many more. But they did not change the world.

Michael Mandelbaum

Once again your mind explodes with a searing pain. A floodgate of memories bursts wide. Yet it is her face that keeps haunting you. Always her face. Who is she Then things begin to crystallize. You remember your funeral. Begging and pleading for someone to release you from the darkness. You're not dead. You can't be. Then you feel her presence. Warm, caring, soothing. But somewhere deep inside she feels empty now. She has no reason. No meaning. No soul. But your soul lives. While her's is dying.

Todd McFarlane

It comes searing ‘cross the skies. It lights the dark of this prison cell, It thunders forth its might, It is "the undauntable thought", my friend, That thought that says "I'm right!"

Bobby Sands

It has withstood the blows of a million years, And will do so to the end. It was born when time did not exist, And it grew up out of life, It cut down evil's strangling vines, Like a slashing searing knife.

Bobby Sands

I was in the enormous and almost deserted square in front of the Great People's Study House-all open spaces in Pyongyang remain deserted unless filled with parades of hundreds of thousands of human automata-when a young Korean slid surreptitiously up to me and asked, "Do you speak English?" An electric moment: for in North Korea, unsupervised contact between a Korean and a foreigner is utterly unthinkable, as unthinkable as shouting, "Down with Big Brother!" "Yes," I replied. "I am a student at the Foreign Languages Institute. Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life." It was the most searing communication I have ever received in my life. We parted immediately afterward and of course will never meet again. For him, Dickens and Shakespeare (which the regime permitted him to read with quite other ends in view) guaranteed the possibility not just of freedom but of truly human life itself.

Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)

We forgot our searing power and lost it, as a result. This is not a searing power coming from an elite of artists that I'm talking about, this is an inherent human power that all of us have the possibility of contacting.

Alan Moore

After that searing meeting with those female soldiers I was even more determined that I was going to achieve real change in our culture.

David Morrison

Poetry is the art that is closest to music, standing between music and narrative orality (which can be speechmaking, sermon or theater). Poetry is the voice of what can't be spoken, the mode of truth-telling when meaning needs to rise above or skim below everyday language in shapes not discernible by the ordinary mind. It trumps the rhetoric of politicians. Poetry is prophetic by nature and not bound by time. Because of these qualities poetry carries grief, heartache, ecstasy, celebration, despair, or searing truth more directly than any other literary art form. It is ceremonial in nature. Poetry is a tool for disruption and creation and is necessary for generations of humans to know who they are and who they are becoming in the wave map of history. Without poetry, we lose our way. (Joy Harjo)

Love doesn't go away because we want it to, but remains even when it becomes a searing pain, leaving the heart a desert of bitter remorse and grief for joy, a happiness that once has been and now never could return. There had been a time when simply to touch this little bit of linen he held now so casually brought every aching moment of that love back. The sense of desolate pain-drenched loss traveled up his arm, enclosing his heart like a set of icy fingers. A time when to look upon what it held was unbearable.

Alice Borchardt

In the bardic tradition, art was understood as magic, the guy who could paint on the cave wall, he was a magician. The idea of representation was a magical idea. Then something happened, and then we all started to believe we were entertainers, and it was just a job, an aesthetic Thatcherism was imposed and we all thought "oh shit, there isn't an art union and we're lucky to have a job. We better accept that we're just the court jesters, and all we are here to do is keep the masses happy, write some more pot-boilers, we are magicians, we are not gods.” Which in fact we are. We just forget that. We forgot our searing power and lost it, as a result. This is not a searing power coming from an elite of artists that I'm talking about, this is an inherent human power that all of us have the possibility of contacting.

Alan Moore

The key play was one that might have been forgotten in the frenetic scrambling of runs. With men on second and third in the sixth and the score 5-5, Willie Mays smashed a searing low line drive into right field that seemed destined to leave the park. But the amazing Roberto Clemente leaped, glove above the railing, crashed into the wire fence and came down with the ball, as 6,028 fans first groaned in anger, then stood to applaud as fine and brave a catch as an outfielder can make.

Roberto Clemente