Ritual Quotes

#1. I wish we could make out in your bed."
Noah sighed. "As do I, but I'm afraid we have ritual burning to conduct."
"It's always something."
"Isn't it though?

Michelle Hodkin

#2. Making resolutions is a cleansing ritual of self-assessment and repentance that demands personal honesty and, ultimately, reinforces humility. Breaking them is part of the cycle.

Eric Zorn

#3. Lieux de memoire ... 'exist because there are no longer any milieux de memoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.' And what are lieux de memoire? [They] are ... vestiges ... the rituals of a ritual-less society.

Tony Judt

#4. He crowned her with roses, girded her with verbena, in the costume of an amorous holocaust.

Josephin Peladan

#5. Music is a gut thing. You're working in a medium which is more in touch with the primal than the modern. A gig is a ritual. There's a congregation.

Siobhan Fahey

#6. When Aquatics are overwhelmed, they seek out the tallest object in view, lie on their backs, put their heads against it and look up. The ritual is called litill, and its purpose is to remind believers that they are actually quite small and, therefore, so are their problems.

Andrew Kaufman

#7. We see that that ritual of reading every evening at the end of the bed when they were so little
set time, set gestures
was like a prayer.

Daniel Pennac

#8. Did he think I was kneeling out of some sort of weird worship ritual because he'd managed to shoot me?

Donna Augustine

#9. Ritual of Solitude works best when you practice it at the same time every day.

Robin S. Sharma

#10. What is any religion? A little ritual, a little superstition, and some magic. It's not a strictly spiritual affair; it has psychological roles to fulfill. You might not want it to be a religion based on your own experience but that's like wanting to clean up your dreams

Gary Snyder

#11. Seventh of the Rituals of Radiant Living: the Ritual of Music.

Robin S. Sharma

#12. Every species has a dinner date as part of courting ritual. A woman who won't let you pay for dinner is rejecting your courtship. She may think she's playing fair, or that she's being a feminist, but a very deep level, she knows that she's crossing you off her list of possibilities.

Jennifer Crusie

#13. Eating is a ritual, and rituals make things easier.

J.M. Coetzee

#14. Myth, legend, and ritual ... function to maintain a status quo. That makes them singularly bad in coping with change, indeed counterproductive, for change is the enemy of myth.

Elizabeth Janeway

#15. Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.

Lionel Trilling

#16. Chinese restaurants have long been a weekly or monthly ritual for many Americans.

Jennifer Lee

#17. Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

Abraham Verghese

#18. Ritual of Personal Reflection.

Robin S. Sharma

#19. How infuriating it is to be continually born to war that continues one's whole lifetime, even as one protests it - what futility. It is perhaps a more public epic in this regard, and carries a ritual vocalization.

Anne Waldman

#20. MID-TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.

Douglas Coupland

#21. When you are writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.

Tom Waits

#22. The magnificence of such objects hardly pertains to the human. They live only in a world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as moving as they are absurd.

Angela Carter

#23. I believe in any religion that puts treating people with respect and dignity above ritual and dogma.

Charles F. Glassman

#24. When a man dies, his wife is burned alive with him, but if the wife dies before her husband, the man does not suffer the same fate. If a man dies before marriage, he is given a posthumous wife. The women passionately want to be burned because they believe they will enter paradise.

Mas'udi

#25. I suppose that the scope and implications of such forces have rendered my personal accounting ritual pretty much obsolete. That's how things sometimes go.

Brian Ferneyhough

#26. Los Angeles is a city looking for a ritual to join its fragments, and The Doors are looking for such a ritual also. A kind of electric wedding. We hide ourselves in the music to reveal ourselves.

Jim Morrison

#27. Feelings are not always a guide to truth, and guilt is an indulgence you cannot afford. It clouds the mind.

Eileen Wilks

#28. I have a personal ritual. Just like 10 minutes before a show, I'll open a beer, just so it feels like I've just arrived at a party. I have a few sips, then we go on stage.

Ed Robertson

#29. A prayer couched in the words of the soul, is far more powerful than any ritual.

Paulo Coelho

#30. Any religion is forever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.

T. S. Eliot

#31. Decoration can be a state of mind, an unusual perception, a ritual whisper.

Ettore Sottsass

#32. If it's God you're worried about, the Lord Jesus said that we needn't keep to the old ways anymore. They had their day years ago.

Diane Samuels

#33. An inordinate love of ritual can be harmful to the soul, unless, of course, in times of great crisis, when ritual can protect the soul from fracture.

Jeff VanderMeer

#34. Sport provides the spectacle, the metaphor, the religious ritual, the putty to fill the cracks in countless lives.

Phillip Adams

#35. Purification and redemption are such recurrent themes in ritual because there is a clear and ubiquitous need for them: we all do regrettable things as a result of our own circumstances, and new rituals are frequently invented in response to new circumstances.

Susan Cain

#36. In the luxuriance of a bowl of grapes set out in ritual display, in a bottle of wine, the soil and sunshine of California reached millions for whom that distant place would henceforth be envisioned as a sun-graced land resplendent with the goodness of the fruitful earth.

Kevin Starr

#37. Neeley came home and he and Francie were sent out for the weekend meat. This was an important ritual and called for detail instructions by mama.

Betty Smith

#38. A cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on Earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens.

Reza Aslan

#39. I like the ritual, the liturgy of a well-crafted, emotional fashion show. I will never be jaded with this side of fashion. The catwalk is pure anthropology, something like an esoteric encrypted parade. It can totally be replaced but it will be missed.

Hedi Slimane

#40. It's a sauna in her," Lily complained. She flapped her hands, trying to wave a breeze into the robe Rowan had told her to wear to this afternoon's ritual instead of the silk slip. "What are we making today? Deep-fried witch?

Josephine Angelini

#41. If I was making a tea advert, I would want to communicate about tea is that it can console you, it can start your day, there is the warmth and the ritual, and you can share it; you make someone a cup of tea and you offer it to them.

Matt Smith

#42. The whole dating ritual was different when I was a kid. Girls got pinned, not nailed.

Bill Maher

#43. Are we going somewhere?" "To the river." "But why?" "To see what we can see." "I really d-don't think . . ." We were going to end up as newspaper headlines: Pensioner and Homosexual Found Dead in River - Coincidence, Tragedy, or Satanic Ritual Gone Wrong?

Alexis Hall

#44. Then you pray the prayer that is the essence of every ritual: God, I have no hope. I am torn to shreds. You are my first and my last and only refuge. Don't do daily prayers like a bird pecking, moving its head up and down. Prayer is an egg. Hatch out the total helplessness inside. - RUMI

Tim Farrington

#45. I loved the atmosphere of the dance studios - the wooden floors, the big mirrors, everyone dressed in pink or black tights, the musicians accompanying us - and the feeling of ritual the classes had.

Suzanne Vega

#46. Loneliness is random; solitude is ritual.

Pearl Cleage

#47. Witches release the chapters of the past, which
invites the novels of the future.

Dacha Avelin

#48. Eventually, ritual was developed as a means of contacting and utilizing the energy within humans as well as in the nature world.

Scott Cunningham

#49. Ballet really lends itself to that because there's such a sense of ritual, with wrapping the shoes every day and preparing new shoes for every performance. It's such a process. It's almost religious, in nature.

Natalie Portman

#50. We need rituals for all traumas and loss, whether it is betrayal or infidelity or violence or murder. Ritual helps us heal, and ritual helped me heal and become ready to consider the person who murdered Angela, his story, his pain.

Desmond Tutu

#51. O sleepless as the river under thee, / Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod, / Onto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend / And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Hart Crane

#52. Seppuku is Japanese for ritual suicide. I thought, What a cute name for a coat.

Lexa Doig

#53. [L]iberation [doesn't occur] in wearing robes or performing ritual acts.

Steve Hagen

#54. I basically try to visualize the team doing good things on the court the night before the game. I get shots up. There's not actually a pregame ritual that I do. I'm still trying to figure that out. I say a prayer. I go out with confidence.

Trey Burke

#55. I had this whole ritual with my mother making the bed with me inside it so I would be invisible.

Ahmet Zappa

#56. I was struck by something rather obvious - namely, that any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper meaning.

Donna Tartt

#57. Fear has always been a diminisher of life. Whether bred in the bogs of superstition or clothed in the brocades of dogma and ritual, the specter of death has reduced the living to supplicants, powerless.

Marya Mannes

#58. Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.

Shirley Jackson

#59. she understood he was lonely and that their ritual comforted him, connected the noises of her life with the silence of his

Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

#60. Shouldn't the preacher who married the couple in the first place have to fly back in on a broomstick for that, too - that moving on? Shouldn't there be some ritual involving a long walk over hot coals while all the guests who'd been at the wedding watched, weeping, throwing stones at your bare

Laura Kasischke

#61. Consider this only pointless ritual if it eases you and cools you to do so. Like church.

Stephen King

#62. When his apprenticeship was finished (the candidate for Knighthood) was received into the Knightly Order by a ritual of sacramental awe ...

Ariel Durant

#63. What nearly everybody in my life had misunderstood about Satanism was that it is not about ritual sacrifices, digging up graves and worshipping the devil. The devil doesn't exist. Satanism is about worshipping yourself, because you are responsible for your own good and evil.

Marilyn Manson

#64. It's about time! It's supposed to be a ritual, not a marathon.

Karen Chance

#65. The putting to death of morality had, on the whole, become a sort of ritual sacrifice necessary for the reassertion of the dominant values of the group - centered for some decades now on competition, innovation, and energy, more than on fidelity and duty.

Michel Houellebecq

#66. Because of the way I'm built, I constantly have to strengthen. This is sort of a ritual: I put on my tights first, and right when I'm about to put on my costume, I get down on the floor, and I plank.

David Hallberg

#67. He said a ritual, right?" asked Becky. "Maybe he's part of one of those doomsday cults where you have to cut off your wang and wear a track suit. They always think the world is going to end for no good reason.

Dennis Liggio

#68. find. At the time, I thought Lewis was a bit hung up on ritual (sacramentalism), but I overlooked this fault

David B. Currie

#69. Lord Raziel. Surely yoy would not have allowed such a thing as a ritual by wich you might be summoned to exist if you did not intend to be summoned. We Nephilim are your children. We need your guidance

Cassandra Clare

#70. Do you not enslave people now?" asks the man. "Chains are forged of many strange metals. Poverty is one. Fear, another. Ritual and custom are yet more. All actions are forms of slavery, methods of forcing people to do what they deeply wish not to do.

Robert Jackson Bennett

#71. I don't think we should give up on ritual. I don't think we should give up on any possible means of experiencing God.

Brian D. McLaren

#72. Patrice had long since buried the particulars of events so painful that they caused her to resolve only to see good. With such a stance, such as dissociative split, she could walk with evil and believe it did not exist. She was Joe's perfect mate.

Judith Spencer

#73. Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do.

Terry Pratchett

#74. Sometimes when you need to feel the all-embracing nature of God, paradoxically you need to hang out in the ordinariness, in daily ritual and comfort.

Anne Lamott

#75. Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized ... That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.

Jonathan Maberry

#76. What we need to be assured of is not that we possess an excellent system of doctrine and ritual, but that the gift of the Holy Spirit is a reality.

Roland Allen

#77. The only [working] ritual is making tea. I use the loose leaves and drink it by the gallon.

Stephen King

#78. I was broke when I lived in New York City during college, so I'd spend weekends walking around town, grabbing something to eat, and interacting with strangers. That ritual has stuck with me.

Jenji Kohan

#79. I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: He is nothing but a boy
a little boy!

Dale Carnegie

#80. Do nothing that is not natural - and ritual is natural - and all will be for the best.

Gore Vidal

#81. Religious ritual is a way of structuring time so that we, not employers, the market or the media, are in control. Life needs its pauses, its chapter breaks, if the soul is to have space to breathe.

Jonathan Sacks

#82. The act of creation is a kind of ritual. The origins of art and human existence lie hidden in this mystery of creation. Human creativity reaffirms and mystifies the power of 'life.

Keith Haring

#83. To make it a habit, do it again and again until it becomes a ritual.

Debasish Mridha

#84. Sex is not some sort of pristine, reverent ritual. You want reverent and pristine, go to church.

Cynthia Heimel

#85. I don't like the whole blowing the candles out ritual ... blowing their germs all over the cake. If I want to catch something on my birthday. I don't want it to be from the cake. If you know what I'm saying ...

Craig Ferguson

#86. Ritual is important to us as human beings. It ties us to our traditions and our histories.

Miller Williams

#87. To pray together, in whatever tongue or ritual, is the most tender brotherhood of hope and sympathy that man can contract in this life.

Madame De Stael

#88. MURRY: Resolutions are a complete waste of time. They're just this meaningless ritual, empty promises we make and break within hours of each other.

Hillary DePiano

#89. In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place of dogma; that is, the sacred lore of priests and people ... and these stories afford the only explanation that is offered of the precepts of religion and the prescribed rules of ritual.

William Robertson Smith

#90. The Igbo used to say that they built their own gods. They would come together as a community, and they would express a wish. And their wish would then be brought to a priest, who would find a ritual object, and the appropriate sacrifices would be made, and the shrine would be built for the god.

Chris Abani

#91. It is a paradox that far too few Americans participate in the wonderful ritual of democracy that we call Election Day.

Brad Henry

#92. The kiss of peace, which was part of the ritual of the mass, was the symbol of trust, and no contract, from a wedding to a truce, was complete without it.

Ken Follett

#93. It is one thing to say that the dwelling has symbolic and cosmological aspects ... and another to say that it has been erected for ritual purposes and is neither shelter nor dwelling but a temple.

Anatol Rapoport

#94. What is man if the signs that predate him have such power? A human race has to invent sacrifices equal to the natural cataclysmic order that surrounds it.

Jean Baudrillard

#95. Steve and I spent a lot of time on the packaging," said Ive. " I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.

Walter Isaacson

#96. With alcoholic ritual, the whole point is generosity. If you open a bottle of wine, for heaven's sake have the grace to throw away the damn cork.

Christopher Hitchens

#97. This is Quilty's audition ritual: whenever he feels it is time for it, he calls upon himself to audition for love. He has no script, no reliable sense of stage, just a faceful of his heart's own greasepaint and a relentless need for applause.

Lorrie Moore

#98. a dream world, a world of magic and ritual, yet there are images there of the burning cars and radar systems, which remind you there is a price to be paid in order to gain this dream in the face of a world of violence.

Derek Jarman

#99. Sixth Ritual for Radiant Living: the Ritual of Early Awakening.

Robin S. Sharma

#100. [...] sometimes mystery defies what our head knows and we feel God reach down into the ordinariness of nightly ritual and speak to our heart with a whisper.

Lindsey O'Connor