Best 183 quotes in «clay quotes» category

We are all jars of clay, fragile and poor, yet we carry within us an immense treasure.

We go, in winter's biting wind, On many a short-lived winter day, With aching back but willing mind To dig and double dig the clay.

We have our thoughts, our hopes, our fears, and yet we know that in a moment a change may come over any one of us that will convert a living, breathing human being into a mass of lifeless clay.

We pick bygone time up by the handfuls and, like clay, see if it feels right and then form it into stories about the past.

We put thirty spokes to make a wheel: But it is on the hole in the center that the use of the cart hinges. We make a vessel from a lump of clay; But it is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful. We make doors and windows for a room; But it is the empty spaces that make the room livable. Thus, while existence has advantages, It is the emptiness that makes it useful.

What's this?" Nick said. "Bedtime?" No one answered him. I kept my eyes closed. You look positively content, Clayton," Nick continued, thumping down on the floor. "That wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that Elena is cuddled up with you, is it?" It's cold in here," I murmured. Doesn't feel cold." It's cold," Clay growled. I could start a fire." I could start one too," Clay said. "With your clothes. Before you get them off.

What well-advised ear regards What earth can say? Thy words are gold, but thy rewards Are painted clay.

When a liberal is abused, he says, ‘Thank God they didn’t beat me.’ When he is beaten, he thanks God they didn’t kill him. When he is killed, he will thank God that his immortal soul has been delivered from its mortal clay.

When Bernard [Leach] wrote his book, he wrote about the fact that even when pots are made in a series, there is a personality to each pot and that the person who made it reflects their personality into the clay.

When I'm sculpting, I work with wood and clay, and though some say that an image is already in the material and the sculptor just has to discover it, I also believe you have an image in your head that you're trying to get to. So you're in a dialogue with the piece, a back-and-forth.

We drove to the airport. On the way, Clay gave him "the lecture," including all the do's and don'ts of meeting the Alpha, which was only slightly more complicated than an audience with the queen. Don't sit until you're invited to. Don't talk unless he asks you a question. Don't eat before he does. Don't make direct eye contact. Jeremy demanded none of this, but that wasn't the point.

What an antithetical mind! - tenderness, roughness - delicacy, coarseness - sentiment, sensuality - soaring and groveling, dirt and deity - all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!

What doesn't kill us sharpens us. Hardens us. Schools us. You're beating plowshares into swords, Vosch. You are remaking us. We are the clay, and you are Michelangelo. And we will be your masterpiece.

When political correctness first started coming around, it ruined Andrew Dice Clay and Eddie Murphy's stand-up career. Sam Kinison died at just the right time, 'cause no one was going to tolerate what he was saying anymore either.

When the jars of clay remember they are jars of clay, the treasure within gets all the glory, which seems somehow more fitting.

When she saw my messy desk, she said she was the same way, and there was no dust on the TV, and I was easy to love. People just need a little help because they are so used to not loving. It's like scoring the clay to make another piece of clay stick to it.

When you're dealing with clay animation, people forget that every single set is built to scale and by hand.

What's the difference between a Dice Clay concert and a Klan rally? Nothing. Trick question.

Who hail thee, Man! the pilgrim of the day, spouse of the worm, and brother of the clay.

You can't discover one foot of clay on an idol without suspecting the other.

Where are they written?" "In the world around us. Merely be attentive to what happens in your life, and you will discover where, every moment of the day, He hides His words and His will. Seek to do as He asks: this alone is the reason you are in the world." "If I discover it, I'll write it on clay tablets." "Do so. But write them, above all, in your heart; there they can neither burned nor destroyed, and you will take them wherever you go.

When we worked at the pottery, we did learn to make pots, that is, the physical act of making the pot. We learned to control clay, to put it where you want it and not just wherever it wanted to go, and that was valuable. At the end of about six months, though, I think if that was all we had, we may have been inclined to leave because the workshop did not challenge us so much as living with [Bernard] Leach did.

won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

Yeah, the actors really come in as lumps of clay. We're ready to work with the directors and find our way. These guys really come in having done their work.

You are the human clay," Vosch whispers fiercely in my ear. "And I am Michelangelo. I am the master builder, and you will be my masterpiece.

You don't need to watch out for me, Clay." But I did, Hannah. And I wanted to. I could have helped you. But when I tried, you pushed me away. I can almost hear Hannah's voice speaking my nest thought for me. "Then why didn't you try harder?

You ask what I have found and far and wide I go, Nothing but Cromwell's house and Cromwell's murderous crew, The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay, And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen where are they?

About Daniel: Two, he hates Clay * Five, he really hates Clay. * Nine, he really, really, REALLY hates Clay.

And now that it's reached 1660 degrees, I can salt glaze it." "What's that?" Aiden held up the bowl. "Watch." He pinched a small amount of salt between his fingers and deposited it through a hole at the top of the kiln. There were actually many holes along the rim, tiny rectangular openings, and Aiden moved from one to the next, sprinkling fingerfuls of salt through them. "Salt does amazing things to clay," he said. "The crystals actually explode when they hit the heat, and then turn into a vapor. It's the vapor that transforms the look of the clay." "How?" I asked. "What's it do?" "It makes the clay glossy, and the surface gets this sort of orange-peel texture. But the really cool thing about salt glazing is that no two pieces ever look the same. Each one is completely unique, depending on how much or how little salt you use.

You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You're not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love.

You see, a potter can only mold the clay when it lies completely in his hand. It requires complete surrender.

And now indeed this substance with its precious humility becomes, through its indestructibility, the most faithful bearer of man's message. As far back as one goes in time, the works of humanity from prehistoric times have reached us not through stone which crumbles and wears away, or through metal which oxidizes and becomes like powder, but through slabs of pottery, the writing on which is as clear today as it was under the stiletto of the scribe who traced it.

Meg felt her heart lurch. It bothered her that the twins realized that she hated their brother. The words coming from their innocent mouths sounded so ugly.

Closed door means knock," Elena said to Clay, shooing him out. You've been in here for two hours," he said. "She can't need that much work." He frowned as he examined my outfit. "What the hell is she? A tree?" "A dryad," Elena said, cuffing him in the arm. "Oh, my god," Jamie said, surveying my outfit. "We forgot the bag!" "Bag?" Clay said. "What does a dryad need with-" "An evening bag," Cassandra said. "A purse." "She's got a purse. It's right there on the bed." "That's a day purse," Cassandra snapped. "What, do they expire when the sun goes down?

Grace leaned forward, studying him up close, able to make out some of his facial features in the clay mask: strong brow, broad cheekbones, prominent jawline and chin. As a flavorist, she was familiar with kaolin clay, a virtually tasteless edible mineral often used as an anti-caking agent in processed foods, various toothpastes, and originally kaopectate. But she'd never encountered the raw product out of the lab, and certainly not like this. She leaned closer to him. He smelled of sediment and mostly sweat, a decidedly masculine note, the precise replication of which one could base an entire career, and then some. Even the most skilled perfumers in the world, experts in the animal secrets of civet and ambergris, couldn't get it just right. It was a human thing. And she'd studied it, androstadienone and most of the known male pheromones, and she knew the effects certain concentrates could have on certain women. She'd written the reports and seen the CT scans of activity in women's brains. Still, knowing about it intellectually and rationally did not in any way lessen what it was doing to her right now, the effect it was having on her senses and her body. 'Can he tell?' she wondered. Lean and broad-shouldered, he had the build of a man who spent his days using his body in labor. She could see it in the way the mud set into the ridged musculature of his forearms, like the russeting across a firm apple. Still, the inner details of him escaped her. His hair was caked with dry clay, and she thought of the figures she'd seen artists craft in their hillside studios in Montmartre, with the Sacre-Coeur church on the summit above and the bawdy Moulin Rouge crowds teeming below. He looked like that, an unglazed unfinished sculpture of a man, but for his eyes, vast and deep, and very much alive, as if he were trapped inside his statued body.

I am not the potter, nor the potter's wheel, but the potter's clay, does it depend on the value achieved intrinsic as much as the value of the clay as the wheel and master craftsmanship?

It was strange to realize that a dragon who couldn't be hurt on the outside could have so many ragged holes on the inside.

But if I close my eyes And wish it all away Pretend I'm someone else, Pretend I'm here to stay Gave us half a chance, Let my stupid heart decide There's no doubt in my mind, You'd be mine

But you don't need anything. You have everything,' I tell him. Rip looks at me. 'No I don't.' 'What?' 'No I don't.' There's a pause and then I ask, 'Oh, shit, Rip, What don't you have?' 'I don't have anything to loose.

Divinity retains the appearance of insight, when in reality it celebrates ignorance. Its tenets are so much clay, and when the clay sets, it becomes dogma.

If Bagel's face was a lump of clay on a pottery wheel, it'd been rapidly thrown from an angry grey blob to a rather enthusiastic vase.

I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary part of writing fiction but as virtual guarantor, insofar as such a thing is possible, of the power of my work: as a sign that I am on the right track, that I am following the recipe correctly, speaking the proper spells. Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth, when the truth matters most, is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth. The adept handles the rich material, the rank river clay, and diligently intones his alphabetical spells, knowing full well the history of golems: how they break free of their creators, grow to unmanageable size and power, refuse to be controlled. In the same way, the writer shapes his story, flecked like river clay with the grit of experience and rank with the smell of human life, heedless of the danger to himself, eager to show his powers, to celebrate his mastery, to bring into being a little world that, like God’s, is at once terribly imperfect and filled with astonishing life. Originally published in The Washington Post Book World

I knew even then that she was right. An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them. Nobu's touch had made a deeper impression on me than most. No one could tell me whether he would be my ultimate destiny, but I had always sensed the en between us. Somewhere in the landscape of my life Nobu would always be present. But could it really be that of all the lessons I'd learned, the hardest one lay just ahead of me? Would I really have to take each of my hopes and put them away where no one would ever see them again, where not even I would ever see them?

Next Clay gave the house rules for living with theSorrentinos , which sounded a lot like the Ten Commandments. Thou shall not lie, steal anything, kill anyone, disrespect your hosts or covet any of Nick's girlfriends. And if you break the rules, you'll get your ass kicked and handed to you in pieces—a part I suspect God left out.

She fucking turns me inside out." "Women who matter have a way of doing that." Lucas scowled. "We sound like a couple of women, talking about feelings. I think Sascha's having a bad influence on me." "You started it.

Oh, Clay darling, if you had told me you were feeling irritated because of your...problems, I wouldn't have made a fuss." She knew very well the changelings around her could hear every whispered word. "Tally." It was a warning growl. "I mean it must be embarrassing for you...being that you're such a big man." her tone implied all sorts of things. "Last night was an aberration, I'm sure. And if not, there are always the pills.

What you repeatedly do carries the clay to mold you into who you eventually become. Don’t despise any tiny minute of the day; each counts so much!

... the scarlet thread,the red clay from which we were made, runs in tiny streams through all our veins, reminding us of where we began ...

We live in a world where a hut made of clay is more durable than brick buildings, because poverty doesn't allow it to be reconstructed.

With red clay between my toes, and the sun setting over my head, the ghost of my mother blows in, riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord, riding on a honeysuckle breeze.