Cowering Quotes

#1. I felt like a bird, caged all its life, set free by an open window and cowering upon the windowsill.

Catherine M. Wilson

#2. We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

D.H. Lawrence

#3. I consider non-violence to be compassion in action. It doesn't mean weakness, cowering in fear, or simply doing nothing. It is to act without violence, motivated by compassion, recognising the rights of others.

Dalai Lama XIV

#4. A worthy opponent can command more
respect from us than a cowering ally.

Matshona Dhliwayo

#5. Isn't it funny that only twenty years ago, they were down there cowering in terror that we trigger-happy, decadent, capitalist Americans would go nuclear on them any minute? Little did they know our secret weapon was Starbucks.

Magnus Flyte

#6. How often a new affection makes a new man! The sordid, cowering soul turns heroic. The frivolous girl becomes the steadfast martyr of patience and ministration, transfigured by deathless love. The career of bounding impulses turns into an anthem of sacred deeds.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

#7. And so the landing party set out, leaving Weatherlight in the hands of an inexperienced pilot, a cowering lookout, and a pacifist guard.

Peter Archer

#8. You worry me, Catherine. You seem to think you're quite invincible."
"I'm well aware that I'm not. But I'll not spend my life cowering. That would be no life at all.

Lorraine Heath

#9. Some people do want to stand on the rooftop and scream out their story. Others are cowering in the corner, or sitting with a blank face in class, and not knowing how to tell their story.

Lauren Myracle

#10. I've always been curious as to why one man jumps out of a fox-hole with a grenade and charges a machine gun nest and his buddy, who sits right there next to him, sits there cowering. My feeling is that the different is tiny between the two.

Stephen Lang

#11. She sees washing lines and women squatting by a stream, and the creaking ropes of a swing beneath a big tree, and a big dog, cowering from the taunts of the village boys, and a hawk-nosed man digging a ditch, shirt plastered to his back with sweat, and a veiled woman bent over a cooking fire.

Khaled Hosseini

#12. And it is miserable to think that this is what adulthood is like: two people, cowering behind their grief, lashing out at each other like injured animals.

Jason Gurley

#13. Better to die with my chin held high than groveling like a cowering worm.

Sarah J. Maas

#14. Snow pursued by the wind is not wholly unlike a retreating army. In the open field it ranges itself in ranks and battalions; where it can get a foothold it makes a stand; where it can take cover it does so. You may see whole platoons of snow cowering behind a bit of broken wall.

Ambrose Bierce

#15. Leading from the front: It's what built America. But these days, the federal government isn't at the front - it's cowering in the back corner of the room, ducking responsibility and hoping no one notices.

Michael Bloomberg

#16. I thought of going the rest of my life pretending I sprang to life from nothing at sixteen years old and felt my cheeks flush with shame and anger. I was so tired of cowering. I was so tired of hiding. I wanted to tell the truth, to say it out loud.

Meredith Russo

#17. Atrocitus: You believe fear to be the most powerful force in the universe? Fear is inaction. Fear is hiding away. Fear is cowering and begging. Rage is action. Rage is spilling blood. Sinestro: Rage is uncontrollable.

William Irwin

#18. I have never known the mind of a wolf hunting a deer, but I imagine it must feel a little like this. The twisted excitement of seeing the weak and wounded cowering before you. The knowledge that, in this instant, you have the power to end its life or grant it mercy. In this moment, I am a god.

Marie Lu

#19. Humans are threatened by anything different, and their response is to fight. They're bullies, picking on the weak, cowering from the strong.

J.R. Ward

#20. Traveling anywhere in the world involves some risk. You could always opt to spend your life cowering under your bed.

Joe Haldeman

#21. He could deal with hatred, but he couldn't deal with fear.
A crying, cowering female in his bed just didn't do it for him. On the other hand, angry sex could be fucking hot as shit.

Larissa Ione

#22. They fascinated him, the unsubtle cowering of the almost rich in the presence of the rich, and the rich in the presence of the very rich; to have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money. Obinze felt repulsion and longing; he pitied them, but he also imagined being like them.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#23. Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.

Henry David Thoreau

#24. Will they cower?' Kym asked.

'Tons of cowering! Plus your name in the summer programme. A custom-designed banner. A cabin at Camp Half-Blood. Two shrines. I'll even throw in a Kymopoleia action figure.'

'No!' Polybotes wailed. 'Not merchandising rights!

Rick Riordan

#25. It is all around us, hidden in plain sight. It is walking our streets, supplying shops and supermarkets, working in fields, factories or nail bars, trapped in brothels or cowering behind the curtains in an ordinary street: slavery.

Theresa May

#26. I didn't believe all her stories," Martha wrote later. "I thought she was exaggerating and a bit hysterical." When Martha left her hotel she witnessed no violence, saw no one cowering in fear, felt no oppression.

Erik Larson

#27. O God! what a thing it is to be a ghost, cowering and shivering in an altered world, a prey to apprehension and despair!

Ambrose Bierce

#28. Yes, I'm sure it will be very peaceful when we are all dead or cowering in submission under the threat of mind control or stuck in an endless simulation.

Veronica Roth

#29. When gloaming treads the heels of day
And birds sit cowering on the spray,
Along the flowery hedge I stray,
To meet mine ain dear somebody.

Robert Tannahill

#30. I've always been curious about why one man jumps out of a foxhole with a grenade and charges a machine gun nest, and his buddy next to him sits there cowering. And my feeling is that the difference is tiny between the two.

Stephen Lang

#31. The heavy rain beat down the tender branches of vine and jessamine, and trampled on them in its fury; and when the lightning gleamed, it showed the tearful leaves shivering and cowering together at the window, and tapping at it urgently, as if beseeching to be sheltered from the dismal night.

Charles Dickens

#32. Worst of all were the accolades and thanks from people "for what you guys did over there." Thanks for what, I wanted to ask - shooting kids, cowering in terror behind a berm, dropping artillery on people's homes?

Nathaniel Fick

#33. Some people - and I am one of them - hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.

Vladimir Nabokov

#34. We will not die cornered and cowering in the ruins of a dead city.

Rachel L. Schade

#35. The difference between towering and cowering is totally a matter of inner posture.

Malcolm Forbes

#36. Most of our obstacles would melt away if, instead of cowering before them, we should make up our minds to walk boldly through them.

Orison Swett Marden

#37. I didn't want to become some embittered old hack getting his revenge for the rest of my life. And I didn't want to become some scared creature cowering in a corner. I remember telling myself not to carry the hatred around, although I know where it is. I have it in a trunk in storage.

Salman Rushdie