Top 98 Quotes About Straining
#1. When I see an actress or actor drag deeply in a movie, I imagine the pyrenes and phenols ravaging the tender epithelial cells and hardworking cilia of their bronchi, the monoxide and cyanide binding to their hemoglobin, the heaving and straining of their chemically panicked hearts.
Jonathan Franzen
#2. I wasn't straining at the bit to become a movie star any more than I had plotted to get out of vaudeville and into Broadway musicals.
Ethel Merman
#3. To receive God's gifts, to live exalted and joy filled, isn't a function of straining higher, harder, doing more, carrying long the burdens of the super-Pharisees or ultra-saints. Receiving God's gifts is a gentle, simple movement of stooping lower.
Ann Voskamp
#4. Constance felt the rest of Jack, the hardness at the top of his thighs, straining against her belly. He lifted her from the floor, held her against the wall, his body pushing her skirts in between her legs. He ground his hips, making her blush as a thousand nerve endings
Heather Boyd
#5. I'm gonna come, Jenna. Because of you. Make me feel so fucking good."
She moaned, adoring the desire and need straining his words. "I wanna feel it," she said.
"Oh, baby, right now," he said. His hips crashed into hers once, twice, three times more, and he cried out. "Oh, fuck, Jenna.
Laura Kaye
#6. Human beings grew up in forests; we have a natural affinity for them. How lovely a tree is, straining toward the sky.
Carl Sagan
#7. It was said that the winds would carry into the Beyond and the Departed used them to send messages back to the Faithful, some of whom would stand for hours on hillsides straining for words of wisdom or comfort from lost loved ones.
Anthony Ryan
#8. Even though running is physically straining, it's mentally refreshing. Especially when you feel like you've accomplished something.
Biz Stone
#9. The sight of me puffing and straining apparently amused him to no end.
Ilona Andrews
#10. Child, if such folks awe you, then picture them on the lavatory, straining, constipated. They will at once seem small, pathetic, manageable." And she whispered to me a great, universal truth: "THE BOWELS ARE GREAT LEVELLERS.
Angela Carter
#11. There are little things that get on my nerves, like people who have reading material in their powder room. When you go in someone's house, and next to the toilet they have a huge basket of magazines, I find that repellent. I recommend against straining while reading.
John Waters
#12. I don't think coaches should have to wear mic's. It is an invasion of privacy. We are trying to accomplish things, and wearing microphones may hinder development by straining the nature of relationships coaches and players have.
Steve Nash
#13. He who sees without loving is only straining his eyes in the darkness.
Maurice Maeterlinck
#14. Define a feather when condemned to the wind. Say how the shaft tapers, straining to be weightless. Describe what the vanes do on the air, how they luff and ruffle and flute, how the barbs somersault on the downward curve of their resisting ride.
Richard Powers
#15. If this was The Lord of the Rings and I had a smart British voice like Cate Blanchett, I could tell you the background of the events of that fall in a really suspenseful way. And you'd be straining to hear the rest.
Charlaine Harris
#16. The straining of dreams against the fabric of reality. Growing up meant burying possibilities, one after another.
Anthony Doerr
#17. Pammy surges out of her seat, arm straining for the sky. She will apparently pee herself if she's not allowed to answer this question.
Josh Lieb
#18. He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes. p 1320
Leo Tolstoy
#19. Fun to think about," Cole said, straining to sound brave. "You get used to it," Jace said. "If you live long enough." "You should become a motivational speaker." Jace grinned.
Brandon Mull
#20. Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.
Anton Chekhov
#21. I spend a lot of time in my bed. It's a good comfy one with a tartan bedspread. It's the only place I can read without straining my neck, and I take an afternoon nap, which is my reward for making enough money from my writing now not to have to work. I never get up in the morning before 11.30.
Martin Millar
#22. Lamentations ease the heart only by straining and exacerbating it more and more. Such grief does not even want consolation; it is nourished by the sense of its unquenchableness. Lamentations are simply the need to constantly irritate the wound.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#23. Straining and straining, getting nowhere, but unable to stop pushing in case the rock should fall and crush him. Meanwhile, arrogant bastards who were in just the same danger lazed on the slopes beside him saying, 'Well, it's not my rock.
Joe Abercrombie
#24. While some of us burned on the edges of life, insatiable and straining to see more deeply in, he sat complacently at the centre and let life come to him - so much of it, evidently, that he could not keep track of his appointments.
John Updike
#25. One senses, in all autobiography, a straining toward perfection, perfection of a kind that connects the individual with a cosmic pattern which, because it is perfect in itself, verifies that individuals own potential perfection.
Roger Rosenblatt
#26. When you became a wizard you were expected to stop shaving and grow a beard like a gorse bush. Very senior wizards looked capable of straining nourishment out of the air via their mustaches, like whales.
Terry Pratchett
#27. Doctors believe that straining too much or too often on the toilet can also seriously increase the risk of varicose veins, a stroke, or defecation syncope - fainting on the toilet.
Giulia Enders
#28. It may be that that we can sing what we often cannot say, whether it be from shyness, fear, lack of the right words or the passion or dramatic gift to express them. More souls have rallied to more causes by the strains of music than by straining rhetoric.
Richard Rodgers
#29. The Rationalist case needs no straining of evidence and always gains by the severest self-criticism.
Joseph McCabe
#30. Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
Milan Kundera
#31. [?] Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
Anonymous
#32. The illusion of free will is straining under the weight of determinism.
Robert Kroese
#33. I didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic combination of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into.
Julian Barnes
#34. He had known that the endless space below him that stretched out like a maw was exactly that: a mouth the size of the world, straining to swallow him.
China Mieville
#35. I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot;
Follow your spirit: and upon this charge,
Cry - God for Harry! England and Saint George!
William Shakespeare
#36. Perceptive observers saw civilization thinned to a mere veneer, with barbarism surging just beneath the surface, straining for release.
Bruce Brander
#37. The moment you enter the room, the earl becomes far more animated. It is obvious that he is fascinated by you. One can hardly have a conversation with him, as he is constantly straining to hear what you are saying, and watching your every movement.
Lisa Kleypas
#38. Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
Stephen Spender
#39. By the highway, the Hudson - the library books straining at their delibags, corners poking. Straining my arms, throttling my hands, the numb rewards of literacy.
Joshua Cohen
#40. Basically, we've learned to delegate. We just grew tired of becoming too psychotic and straining to make the records ourselves.
Stevie Jackson
#41. Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#42. Overcrowded cities are spawning increasingly lawless suburbs. Waste is accumulating in and around them, straining the capacity to deal with it.
Christian De Duve
#43. I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow
Billy Collins
#44. The thought of retirement set his nerves twitching and straining: he always prayed that death would come first.
Graham Greene
#45. The discrepancy between what was expected and what has been observed has grown over the years, and we're straining harder and harder to fill the gap.
Jeremiah P. Ostriker
#46. There is no error which hath not some appearance of probability resembling truth, which, when men who study to be singular find out, straining reason, they then publish to the world matter of contention and jangling.
Walter Raleigh
#47. We have to get to a hospital," Elysia said, straining under the weight of Ferbus. "We're losing him."
"Your FACE is losing him," Ferbus confirmed.
Gina Damico
#48. Straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in all law schools.
Robert A. Heinlein
#49. The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
George Santayana
#50. Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#51. What had John Keats said about Negative Capability - holding two opposite ideas in one's mind at the same time without straining to reconcile them?
Dan Simmons
#52. True grace is natural, not artificial, because, however strenuously you strive to gain it, when it is gained it never gives the impression of effort or straining for effect.
Frederic Dan Huntington
#54. Suzy Zeus is tense as stemware,
not explosive, just on edge -
needs a ten-foot wall around her,
or at least a ten-foot hedge,
Suzy's straining, teeth to toenails,
easing backward on the ledge.
Maggie Robbins
#55. They were straining so desperately for admission to paradise that they had forgotten that paradise had always been their address.
Tom Robbins
#56. The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#57. Trying to understand is like straining through muddy water. Have the patience to wait! Be still and allow the mud to settle.
Lao-Tzu
#58. I am fussy, about my diet and straining my voice. I know, sounds a bit over the top. But I'm not as bad as I used to be. These days I don't drink alcohol for five days before a show - very dehydrating for the vocal cords, and all that acid reflux. I used to ban it for a fortnight. Nightmare.
Katherine Jenkins
#59. Someone has broken your heart. I knew there was something about you. That's it, isn't it?'
A little," Sara said, suddenly self-conscious.
I'm sorry.'
It happens." She shrugged, straining for nonchalance.
Maybe,' he said. 'But if it's your destiny, what can you do but accept it.
Jennifer Vandever
#60. [ ... ] and yet the woman's existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin.
Yasunari Kawabata
#61. Yanking at my leg, straining every muscle, my customized Gray Ghost rebuilt as a chopper sparks and squeals.
My boot catches and I'm flipped. Sliding down E-70 Highway on leather, my gloves scrubbed by the tarmac.
Poppet
#62. Illegal immigration is crisis for our country. It is an open door for drugs, criminals, and potential terrorists to enter our country. It is straining our economy, adding costs to our judicial, healthcare, and education systems.
Timothy Murphy
#63. Straining to appear judicial, he turned toward the jury box. "The jurors shall disregard the last ... uh ... colloquy between the witness and defense counsel." Might as well ask the residents of Pompeii to ignore the volcano.
Paul Levine
#64. You don't believe in the soul until you feel it straining to escape the body.
Glen Duncan
#65. He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako's life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman's existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself.
Yasunari Kawabata
#66. It is not the straining for great things that is most effective; it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
#67. I kissed her salty tears and murmured, murmured I don't know what. I felt her body straining, straining to meet mine and I felt my own contracting and drawing away and I knew that I had begun the long fall down.
James Baldwin
#68. If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they'd be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, do be straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl.
J.M. Synge
#69. I'm scared of becoming a noise crank, but I always just loved quiet. I love to have conversations without straining to hear...
George Prochnik
#70. Carol turned around quickly as if stifling an urge to lunge at Max. He turned back to Max, straining to appear genial. "Okay," he said, "but will you come over here and put your head in my mouth again?"
Max continued to back up, "No, Carol. I don't want to right now.
Dave Eggers
#71. Attention is the vital thing and there is no tension in attention. It just happens to be a similar word. It's not concentration or straining. Attention has the openness of a young child not yet dominated by the conceptual mind.
Eckhart Tolle
#72. I can see her, chin to chest, straining to push Junior out, and Junior snagging on her insides, grabbing hold of what he caught on to try to stay inside her, but instead he pulled it out with him when he was born.
Jesmyn Ward
#73. With Angela drawn to the hangdog look and Malachy lonely after three months in jail, there was bound to be a knee-trmbler.
A knee-trmbler is the act itself done up against a wall, man and woman up on their toes, straining so hard their knees tremble with the excitement that's in it.
Frank McCourt
#74. Despite the fact that life has repeatedly reinforced my conviction that the tomb was empty, some of my most profound errors have occurred when I was straining under the weight of a death that was in reality the liberation of a transition.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#75. The ship groaned and growled beneath him like a constipated fat man straining to shit.
George R R Martin
#77. He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string.
Jonathan Franzen
#78. It is not an "imitation of Christ" but its exact opposite: an assimilation of the Christ-image to his own self, which is the "true man."349 It is no longer an effort, an intentional straining after imitation, but rather an involuntary experience of the reality represented by the sacred legend. This
C. G. Jung
#79. Flowed through me. He didn't pull away. It seemed as though he was straining forward, his upper body already over the gearshift
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#80. Clarke stared at the crash scene, eyes straining in the dark, waiting for the inevitable moment when her training would kick in, when her instincts would anesthetize her panic. But hovering at the edge of the wide expanse of debris, absorbing the destruction, all she felt was horror. It
Kass Morgan
#81. I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray ... I am myself the matter of my book.
Michel De Montaigne
#82. Zane was hard, too, straining against his boxers. He whimpered, desperate for more. It wasn't often that Zane wanted this from Ty - needed it, begged for it - but when he did, Ty would nearly eat him alive before getting him off. Zane
Abigail Roux
#83. I open my eyes. That's when I discover what that wailing sound was. My mouth wasn't frozen shut after all. When I finally understand why Aidan and Lucio sounded like they were arguing from miles away: I was straining to hear them over the sound of my own voice. This whole time I've been screaming.
Paige McKenzie
#84. Exert only calculated force where it will be effective, rather than straining and struggling with pointless attrition tactics.
Ryan Holiday
#85. I used to spend most of my time straining to be a nice guy so people would like me.
Elia Kazan
#86. If the human species is differentiated from the beasts by the marvel of consciousness, then we enact our humanity and the very authenticity of our being by straining to "know" through awareness the "unthinkable" experience of others.
Lawrence L. Langer
#87. I felt the pain and the glory of growth, was straining and shuddering with it.
Nnedi Okorafor
#88. George W. Bush spoke to the camera, his face so decisively earnest that it was clear he was lying, his button eyes lit up with amateurish subterfuge. Only truly great men can be adept at shameless lying, Joshua thought. This dude was straining to the point of snapping.
Aleksandar Hemon
#89. No construction stiff working overtime takes more stress and straining than we did just to stay high.
Gus Van Sant
#90. It is not uncommon in modern times to see governments straining every nerve to keep the peace, and the people whom they represent, with patriotic enthusiasm and resentment over real or fancied wrongs, urging them forward to war.
Elihu Root
#91. What is the use of straining after an amiable view of things, when a cynical view is most likely to be the true one?.
George Bernard Shaw
#92. The French may be straining the truth in their famous saying that "to understand all is to forgive all"," but it is certainly true that the more we know of any given person, the harder it becomes to hate him.
Sydney J. Harris
#93. Your best ideas, those eureka moments that turn the world upside down, seldom come when you're juggling emails, rushing to meet the 5 P.M. deadline or straining to make your voice heard in a high-stress meeting. They come when you're walking the dog, soaking in the bath or swinging in a hammock.
Carl Honore
#94. Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation.
J.D. Salinger
#95. We run, straining, gasping, and groaning, in our own separate directions, and the more we struggle the closer we're pulled together.
Antti Tuomainen
#96. Population growth is straining the Earth's resources to the breaking point, and educating girls is the single most important factor in stabilizing that. That, plus helping women gain political and economic power and safeguarding their reproductive rights.
Al Gore
#97. To stop himself from reaching out, he folded his arms over his chest, his shirt straining. Her gaze fell, locking on his left bicep. Damn. If she wanted him the way he wanted her, they were going to be in trouble. Lots and lots of pleasurable, oh, so wrong trouble. Again
Gena Showalter
