Keening Quotes

#1. I walk through the seasons and always the birds
are singing and screaming and keening for love
When you're with me it seems so absurd
that I should be jealous of the jay and the dove.

Maggie Stiefvater

#2. My arms wrapped about little Jala, little sister, hot with fever but the fire grew too hot, and so, in my arms, her flesh cooled to dawn-stone, mother keening - Jala was the ember now lifeless, and from that day, in mother's eyes, I became naught but its bed of ash.

Steven Erikson

#3. You can look up keening in the dictionary, but you don't know what it means until you hear somebody having their heart ripped out.

Bryn Greenwood

#4. She notices the unyielding ruthlessness of the storm; the crashing waves, the bitter sky kissing the water on the horizon, the keening laments of the sharp, cutting wind, and the relentless liquid deliverance of its somber showers. She'll never forgive the audacity of the storm's neglect.

Laura Kreitzer

#5. impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises - on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive

Truman Capote

#6. Just then, my phone started ringing. The ring must have been damaged by the water as well, so now it had a high, keening note - kind of the sound I imagine a mermaid might make if you punched her in the face.

Maureen Johnson

#7. I closed my mouth in order to cut off the high-pitched keening escaping my lips. Who knew a wolf could scream like a jungle cat?

Micalea Smeltzer

#8. Where did you get your sadness from?

I picked it up on the side of the road. It
was bleeding and scratched and keening
like a mangled thing, but it looked too
beautiful for me to just walk away.

Darshana Suresh

#9. Like blood out of a wound, a keening wail rose from the bottom of my heart and ripped through the graveyard. I lowered my face to Hadassah's shoulder and went quietly and thoroughly to pieces.

Angela Elwell Hunt

#10. Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day at numbness, silence.

Anne Lamott

#11. As if keening on your knees
were somehow obscene
As if there were a control
so marvelous
you could teach it
to eat pain.

Maggie Nelson

#12. It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,/rising.

Robert Hass

#13. I dream of songs. I dream they fall down through the centuries, from my distant ancestors, and come to me. I dream of lullabies and sea shanties and keening cries and rhythms and stories and backbeats.

Rosanne Cash

#14. But from here on
I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening
-from A Woman Dead in Her Forties

Adrienne Rich

#15. He sang the song of the sword, keening as he fed his blade, and Rollo, standing thigh-deep in the creek, ax swinging in murderous blows, blocked the enemy's escape. The Frisians, transported from confidence to bowel-loosening fear, began to drop their weapons.

Bernard Cornwell

#16. When someone shows me even the tiniest bit of kindness my entire soul still twists towards them. A sunflower searching for the sun. A hatchling keening for its mother. I

Darshana Suresh

#17. The dogs were really keening now, like Irish widows.

Thomas Keneally

#18. I thought about that as we waited for the ghouls to pass. I pretended not to see Annabeth wipe a tear from her cheek as she listened to the mournful keening of Cerberus in the distance, longing for his new friend.

Rick Riordan

#19. Despite their authoritarian light show, those ice-cream trucks of death couldn't do any more for Perkus's murdered infatuation, his crushed crush, than could keening Greek chorus, or a moaning witch doctor.

Jonathan Lethem

#20. There was a tiny silence, only the soft hum of the fluorescence. I thought of her in the cold ruined house, with night birds keening above her and rain gentle all around, dying of breathing

Tana French

#21. How anyone can be that dumb and still be able to eat with a fork is beyond me.

K.D. McCrite

#22. Beyond the silver span of the motor bridge lay basins of cracked mud the size of ballrooms - models of a state of mind, a curvilinear labyrinth.

J.G. Ballard

#23. What have I to do with millions [of people]? The eighty I know despise me.

Charlotte Bronte

#24. I'll be in Heaven getting your room ready.

Emma Donoghue

#25. Please make this nation remember how futures are built

Mario Cuomo

#26. Ethical systems and practices need to look good. They have to be desirable, well-designed and work well.

Adrian Grenier

#27. If you only stand up for speech you approve of, you're a hack. If you only stand up for speech that everyone approves of, you're a coward.

Glenn Reynolds

#28. Now he was going numb, and that scared him more than pain because it meant he might just...fade. Fade right into death without noticing.

V.E Schwab

#29. Acedia is sorrow so complete that the flesh pervails completely over the spirit. You don't just turn your back on the world, you turn your back on God. You don't care, and you don't care that you don't care.

Mishka Shubaly