Best 183 quotes in «clay quotes» category

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    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.

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    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

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    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.

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    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?

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    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?

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    ... 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 ...

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    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!

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    Within the shadows of honor, courage often walks in silence. -Engraved on the monument Clay built

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    And clay-caked clothes are so last year.

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    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.

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    Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.

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    A good man may fall, but he falls like a ball [and rebounds]; the ignoble man falls like a lump of clay.

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    Are you as much of a criminal if you don't act when there's a crime taking place in front of you as you are one of the participants? That was something that I was thinking about a lot because there are many moments in 'Less Than Zero' where horrific things happen and Clay could do something about them, but his passivity stops him.

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    All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

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    As ye of clay were cast by kind, So shall ye waste to dust.

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    And you poor creatures--who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business, too?

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    Boo," I said. He reacted as all mutts react when I confront them. He leapt from his chair and dove for the nearest exit, shaking in terror. In my dreams. He glanced at me and started looking for Clay. It never failed. Mutts only quaked when I appeared because it usually meant Clayton wasn't far behind. I was nothing but a harbinger of doom.

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    Beautiful in form and feature, lovely as the day, can there be so fair a creature formed of common clay?

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    Cassius Clay must be beaten and the Black Muslims' scourge removed from boxing.

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    Clay is molded to form a cup, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the cup depends. Doors and windows are cut out to make a room, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the room depends. Therefore turn being into advantage, and turn non-being into utility.

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    But eventually I moved the portraiture into the smaller clay things which gave them more of a caricature look to them, rather than a characterization.

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    But clay and clay differs in dignity, Whose dust is both alike.

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    Clay Cook is a first class musician. Tender tormented genius here in 'North Star'. I will kill him if he leaves my band and he knows it. Great record.

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    Clay is one of the best things you can put in your body.

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    Clay is used to make vases, but it is the emptiness they contain that makes them useful.

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    Creative work is more accurately a machine that digs down and finds stuff, emotional stuff that will someday be raw material that can be used to produce more stuff, stuff like itself - clay to be available for future use.

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    Data!data!data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay.

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    Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

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    Did you use a chainsaw?" Joey said. "I seem to recall you like chainsawa." "There wasn't a power outlet." Clay turned to me. "That's what I want for Father's Day, darling. A gas powered chainsaw.

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    Dice Rules is one of the most appalling movies I have ever seen. It could not be more damaging to the career of Andrew Dice Clay if it had been made as a documentary by someone who hated him. The fact that Clay apparently thinks this movie is worth seeing is revealing and sad, indicating that he not only lacks a sense of humor, but also ordinary human decency.

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    Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?

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    Everything I do is a direct creation of my hands, whether it is made in wood,  plaster or clay.

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    'Empathy' is the latest code word for liberal activism, for treating the Constitution as malleable clay to be kneaded and molded in whatever form justices want. It represents an expansive view of the judiciary in which courts create policy that couldn't pass the legislative branch or, if it did, would generate voter backlash.

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    Disneyland is like a piece of clay: If there is something I don't like, I'm not stuck with it. I can reshape and revamp.

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    Food is like clay; you can sculpt with it. Also it has an odor, and you can eat it. I don't eat a lot of cake, but I do make cakes! And unlike the Campbell's Soup Cans, my food is a humanized form and scale.

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    False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day ... the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.

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    For me, one of my favorite parts of stop motion is not even the animating or the writing, but actually building. I always say that my favorite stage is just fabrication. It's just sitting on a workbench, making a little thing out of clay or whatever. That just totally excites me.

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    For as from the same piece of clay a potter may fashion either a pot or a tile, so the Devil may shape a witch into a wolf or a cat or even a goat, without subtracting from her and without adding to her at all. For this occurs just as clay is first molded into one, then shaped into another form, for the Devil is a potter and his witches are but clay.

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    Freedom can never be true of name and form; it is the clay out of which we (the pots) are made; then it is limited and not free, so that freedom can never be true of the related. One pot can never say "I am free" as a pot; only as it loses all ideas of form does it become free.

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    Gold like the sun, which melts wax, but hardens clay, expands great souls.

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    Have you noticed that bones are always modeled and not carved, that you always have the impression they come from a mold, that they were first modeled in clay? Any bone you look at, you always find fingerprints on it.

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    Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both.

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    Go out and ask her into the alley.” Clay looked at Jeremy as if he’d just been told to dance the rumba on a public thoroughfare. I bit back a laugh. “Just walk over to her and point at the alley. Maybe say…I don’t know…something like ‘fifty bucks.’ ” I looked at Jeremy. “Does that sound right? Fifty?” His brows shot up. “Why are you asking me?” “I wasn’t—I just meant, as a general…” I threw up my hands. “How am I supposed to know how much a hooker costs?

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    How shall we celebrate the day,When God appeared in mortal clay,The mark of worldly scorn;When the Archangel's heavenly Lays,Attempted the Redeemer's Praise,And hail'd Salvation's Morn!