Top 62 Retreated Quotes
#1. Nick retreated, afraid to admit he couldn't handle it in front of a bunch
Jennifer Probst
#2. In the silence I heard Bastet, who had retreated under the bed, carrying on a mumbling, profane monologue. (If you ask how I knew it was profane, I presume you have never owned a cat.)
Elizabeth Peters
#3. And then it was between Shane and Claire on who retreated first. "Uou go," he said.
"Why?"
Shane and Pete exchangedblooks. "Seriously?" Pete asked.
"Yeah, she's like that," Shane said, and turned to her. "Because you're my girlfriend, and I'm not going unti; I know you're safe. How's that?
Rachel Caine
#4. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made....
F Scott Fitzgerald
#5. The problem is that during the 1980s, a decade of heavy poaching, the elephants retreated to safer areas. And now people have moved into the corridors once used by the elephants.
Richard Leakey
#6. In recent decades, Europe has retreated to the conduct of soft power. But besieged as it is on almost all frontiers by upheavals and migration, Europe, including Britain, can avoid turning into a victim of circumstance only by assuming a more active role.
Henry Kissinger
#7. A pang shot through her as she realized how absolutely she trusted the tabby warrior to guard them while they retreated.
Erin Hunter
#8. At his words, the good butterflies trounced the bad butterflies and the bad ones retreated to Siberia.
Kristen Ashley
#9. He'd read once that in everyone's life there was somebody who touched a spot so deep, so precious, that the mind always retreated, in time of need, to that cherished place, seeking comfort within memories that never seemed to disappoint.
Steve Berry
#10. ... then he sat on his bed and for a fraction of a second the shadows retreated and he had a fleeting glimpse of reality. He felt dizzy and he closed his eyes. Without knowing it he fell asleep.
Roberto Bolano
#11. A dutiful soldier, I retreated to the ditches as ordered and hunkered down there. In those ditches, I had an epiphany. People treat you as badly as you let them treat you.
Karen Marie Moning
#12. It had been a turning point in her life, in some sense it's most important moment; she had seen the world and retreated.
Philipp Meyer
#13. Along the borders to Ethiopia and Somalia, anarchy reigns, the police and military have retreated quite some distance.
Richard Leakey
#14. Despair dragged at me like an anchor, pulling me down. I closed my eyes and retreated to some dim place within, where there was nothing but an aching grey blankness ...
Diana Gabaldon
#15. Beside me Makin looked to have retreated into that closed and lonely place that we all reach if we keep digging. Dig a little deeper than that and you're in hell of a sudden.
Mark Lawrence
#16. Her endless, futile attempts to make her feelings known fell on stony ground. Slowly she retreated into the darkness where her dreams became reality and reality faded into the deep recesses of her soul....
Virginia Alison
#17. Matrona's heart retreated until it hit her spine, and she quivered with its every beat.
Charlie N. Holmberg
#18. Just as [he] had expected. The preacher retreated to authority as soon as he feared his ideas could not stand on their own merit. Reasonable argument was impossible when authority became the arbiter ...
Orson Scott Card
#19. That solitude promotes insight as well as change," Storr continues, "has been recognized by the great religious leaders" - including the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed - "who have usually retreated from the world before returning to it to share what has been revealed to them.
Joshua Wolf Shenk
#20. I was a young person once, shortly after the polar ice caps retreated, and I distinctly recall believing that virtually all adults were clueless goobers.
Dave Barry
#21. We had allowed our eyes to meet only once- by accident as much as out of necessity- and not ten seconds had passed before the agony had become too great to bear and we had retreated into silence and coldness once more.
Kailin Gow
#22. Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat.
Emile Zola
#23. The world had retreated. I felt sunk inside myself, inside my flesh, which seemed to me not only the sole dwelling possible but also the only material for which it was worthwhile to struggle. It
Elena Ferrante
#25. Here then I retreated, and lay down, happy to have found a shelter, however miserable, from the inclemency of the season, and still more from the barbarity of man.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#26. Respectable Protestant denominations retreated inside...leaving...unaffiliated madwomen to evangelize alfresco...
Sara Miles
#27. Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.
Octavio Paz
#28. Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
Terry Eagleton
#29. It was well past midnight, quiet, few people around. All noises had retreated. The night seemed to have its own resonance. At that hour, the city's a gong that was struck at noon and is not yet quite still.
Sam Thompson
#30. The sky seemed abruptly to have had enough of my dithering and dramatically lightened up around the glowing moon, which retreated like an aging sovereign before the rising sun.
Mary Ellen Hannibal
#31. I tend to worry about the minutiae of life. But living in the mountains of Idaho and having retreated from fame, I am more in tune with life.
Pamela Sue Martin
#32. I'm feeling how profoundly my family disappointed me and in the end how I retreated, how I became nothing, because that was much less risky than attempting to be something, to be anything in the face of such contempt.
A.M. Homes
#33. I'd known love before, and it had brought me so much pain that I had retreated behind an impenetrable wall of indifference, freezing out everything, everyone.
Julie Kagawa
#34. Whenever he's tried to dig out such secrets from her behind her mother's back, she has retreated like a tortoise into her child's shell. Children are quick to sense a threat. (From "Crows" by Mrinal Pande)
Keerti Ramachandra
#35. The white flashed back into a red ball in the southeast. They all knew what it was. It was Orlando, or McCoy Base, or both. It was the power supply for Timucuan County.
Thus the lights went out, and in that moment civilization in Fort Repose retreated a hundred years.
So ended The Day.
Pat Frank
#36. Instinctively, I shoved my arm into the void in front of my face and backed up. I heard heavy breathing, a soft grunt, and then I was roughly thrown aside. As the footsteps retreated, I tried to see who it was, but it was too dark.
Suzanne M. Trauth
#37. When they saw the host of chameleon butterflies and the way they both clothed the girl Ayesha and provided her with her only solid food, these visitors were amazed, and retreated with confounded expectations, that is to say with a hole in their pictures of the world that they could not paper over.
Salman Rushdie
#38. He hurried back. Walls seemed to shift and advance. Right here, it must be. Wasn't this passage too short? No, it wasn't a wall that blocked his way, only fog. The fog retreated before him - then at once yielded up a wall. Staggering crimson letters caught in the web of graffiti spelled KILLER.
Ramsey Campbell
#39. Before Guadalcanal the enemy advanced at his pleasure - after Guadalcanal he retreated at ours.
Halsey
#40. There is a glacier in Iceland, Solheimar, which has retreated a great deal, and every time I go back there and see what's not there any more, it does something to the heart. It makes you realise it's possible for a gigantic natural element to just disappear.
James Balog
#41. But, for now, I retreated back down the little hidden staircase into the familiar world of the basement of the Natural History Museum, and to the embrace of the trilobites.
Richard Fortey
#42. So after they'd been swindled and bamboozled by the Terrans enough times they retreated to their home planets and bolted all the doors and drew all the curtains. Terrans are tricky customers to deal with even for other humans, so a saintly robot would have had no chance.
J.H.G. Foss
#43. Whatever we saw in October 1941, cannot be compared to anything that we had seen prior, when our forces retreated from the Dniepr borders. Now, things like this no longer happen. Now, we can frown by ourselves.
Ivan Bagramyan
#45. But the problem was that I had retreated so far into myself - shielding myself from the ghosts and memories of this place - that I had become reliant upon the comfort and rituals and plans.
Jeremy Jackson
#46. No matter how she had suffered, Darby hadn't retreated from life after all. In fact, she'd embraced it. Quietly, carefully, but with dignity and love.
Fiona Davis
#47. She wasn't a cowardIf she were she would have retreated back into her shell years before and pulled back entirely from life. She was a fighter. Life knocked her down, and she coped by getting up and moving on.
Dee Henderson
#48. Eve took a bite from the apple, chaos ensued... earth became hell as heaven retreated behind an impenetrable veil.
Hamilton Stone
#49. Leslie Stephen died in 1904. In that year his children retreated to Wales for a period and then travelled in Italy. Vanessa and Virginia went on to Paris, where they met up with Clive Bell. On returning to London, Virginia suffered
a severe, suicidal breakdown.
Jane Goldman
#50. I was very uncomfortable with all the attention when it first started happening to me. I retreated quite a bit from the world, both physically and emotionally. But then you just accept that you can't control what the rest of the world thinks or does.
Dennis Quaid
#51. The bad thing caught you.
I've never retreated in my life. I've never backed away from a fight and I've never cowered in fear. Ever. That's not who I am. But I've been in combat long enough to know that when something unbeatable chases you, you do the only thing you can do.
You run. - Gabe
Courtney Cole
#52. Women, who enjoyed a high social status and levels of education under Saddam, saw terrible setbacks as Iraq fell into civil war. As a result of the sectarian violence from 2005-2007, women retreated to their homes and fell from public view.
Richard Engel
#53. I'd begun to grow weary of my constant daydreaming because, as I retreated more often into fantasy, it had become a reminder of my growing discontent with real life. And my thoughts, after very little sleep, seemed to float even further into the realm of the superfluous.
Nick Miller
#54. They'd retreated to the country with two passports only. From the outside it looked like death. People could pound the walls all they wanted, but they'd never find the door. Nobody could guess at the gardens inside.
Janet Fitch
#55. I had retreated to reporting because I doubted the reality of my inner voice
Gloria Steinem
#56. I used to think fear either numbed or nudged. Now I knew fear did neither. Fear was a key that fit every person's hollow spaces---those things that kept us cold at night and that place where we retreated when no one was looking---and all it could do was unlock what was already there.
Roshani Chokshi
#57. Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.
Dana Gioia
#58. Not a very regal send-off for a prince." I laughed as the lions retreated into the bush again.
"That was me and Goma when I was little," said Jack, starting the car. "I was always chasing something, and she was always pulling me back.
Leylah Attar
#59. Despite all her strengths, there was a certain brittleness to her. Sometimes she retreated into
her keep. Sometimes she ran away. But she did not forgive and she did not forget.
Sherry Thomas
#60. Remember, the Arctic didn't have any ice. And the Northwest Passage was wide open. They were raising grapes in Scotland for God sakes, had a huge winery. Iceland was a farming community. As some of the glaciers retreated they found villages that were covered with ice.
Don Young
#61. Don't worry," I said, as the feeling retreated. "I'm not interested in that Neanderthal.
Kiera Cass
#62. I watched her silently as she retreated. And somewhere deep down inside, somewhere where there were no rules and no limits, somewhere where only the beating of my own heart could be heart, love took root.
Mia Sheridan
