Top 100 Shell Quotes
#1. We are bound to our bodies like an oyster to its shell.
Plato
#2. There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.
Elliot Richardson
#3. Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny private, shell-bound realm - which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world.
Eknath Easwaran
#4. When I think back, I get mad at what they did to those poor men. Ernie must have had PTSD - they called it shell shock - and the doctors told him to keep it all bottled up inside. They didn't know any better, but it was like treating syphilis with candy bars.
Anita Diamant
#5. You are a shell of a man, all she has to do is knock against you to find out you are empty.
Nicole Krauss
#6. What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find happiness so easily.
Rosamunde Pilcher
#7. Gray vines coiled leftward in this northern hemisphere, what winds them shapes the dogwhelk's shell. Weeds sprouted from cinder and brick.
Cormac McCarthy
#8. We say submarining is a team sport, but in practice it often amounts to a bunch of individuals, each working in his own shell, rather than a rich collaboration.
L. David Marquet
#9. I'm a very feminine person, but I have this hard shell, man, and I stay focused and don't take things personally.
Zoe Saldana
#10. I guess this is gonna sound kind of weird, but I'm not scared for myself for dying. Because I believe all these places are temporary. This is just one shell. Because we Hawaiians live in both worlds.
Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
#12. So I don't think I'm gonna pull my head into my shell just because a bunch of people start acting like idiots.
Todd Rundgren
#13. Secrets and lies, they eat your insides until all you have left is a hard thin skin that covers you like the shell of one of those eggs you poke a little hole in and draw out its eggy contents before you dye it for Easter.
Russell Banks
#14. I know I come off like a very outgoing person, and yeah, I'm outgoing, but there's also a part of me that still likes to be in my little shell sometimes.
Ashley Tisdale
#15. 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
#16. I want to be alone. Sympathies wasted on my hollow shell. I feel there's nothing left to fight for. No reason for a cause.
Sarah McLachlan
#17. Truth is what every man sees lurking at the bottom of his own soul, like the oyster shell housewives put in the kitchen kettle to collect the lime from the water. By and by each man's iridescent oyster shell of Truth becomes coated with the lime of prejudice and hearsay.
Christopher Morley
#18. I don't want to sound too mystical or weird but it's important to know what garlic smells like when it's cooking, or what eggs look like when they're cracked out of a shell.
Joel Salatin
#19. Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.
Meghan O'Rourke
#20. A pearl in the shell does not touch the ocean. Be a pearl without a shell. a mindful flooding. a spark turned to flame. bird settling nest. love lived
Rumi
#21. We learn to make a shell for ourselves when we are young and then spend the rest of our lives hoping for someone to reach inside and touch us. Just touch us - anything more than that would be too much for us to bear.
Bill Russell
#22. The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long life seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed.
..
Virginia Woolf
#23. The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.
D.T. Suzuki
#24. It was as though she has found refuge inside a shell and the only sound she could hear was the sea of an inimical world.
Milan Kundera
#26. Set fire to cities and nations, to hearts and minds, to the very core of every human spirit. Make sure your words seep into the skin of the reader, leaving trace minerals that sustain the ailing human shell. Make them pay attention. Set fire to the soul. Anything less is an abomination to creation.
Susan Marie
#27. It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures.
Robert Greene
#28. I've never met a shell before. What a marvelous gift.
Marissa Meyer
#29. That's who I was. Always an outsider. As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or
Trevor Noah
#30. The body on the ground is nothing more than a shell, a husk, and I am filled with a sense of peace. Yes, I think. Yes. This is what I want to be. An instrument of mercy, not vengeance.
R.L. LaFevers
#31. A person is not some private entity traveling unaffected through time and space as if sealed off from the rest of the world by some thick shell.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#32. You build a character, a shell, and if you build it right, something comes to live inside it.
Elizabeth Hand
#33. It was the early 1970s and I was recently divorced. I had three kids and was totally broke. I managed to find work back east on the straw-hat circuit - summer stock - but couldn't afford hotels, so I lived out of the back of my truck, under a hard shell.
William Shatner
#34. We do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on.
T. S. Eliot
#35. I think I've always been half out of my shell and half in. Sometimes I can be extremely wild and sometimes I can be extremely shy. It just depends on the day.
Emile Hirsch
#36. The shell model, although proposed by theoreticians, really corresponds to the experimentalist's approach. It was born from a thorough study of the experimental data, plotting them in different ways, and looking for interconnections.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer
#37. Would you love a man of a broken shell after the passing of a women's soul?
Brian Perkins
#38. I think acting has helped me come out of my shell because when I play a character, I can't be self-conscious.
Joan Cusack
#39. Every good rowing coach, in his own way, imparts to his men the kind of self-discipline required to achieve the ultimate from mind, heart, and body. Which is why most ex-oarsmen will tell you they learned more fundamentally important lessons in the racing shell than in the classroom.
Daniel James Brown
#40. Ah, but would we not all be the fools to attack an armored turtle through its shell?
R.A. Salvatore
#41. Your body is a divine container that will change over your lifetime. Revel in this! Notice it! This is the way of things: the softening of the shell so the soul may emerge.
Sara Wiseman
#42. I didn't expect that for every shell on the coast there's a tree in the midlands.
Sara Baume
#43. On the other hand, a flaccid, moping, debauched mollusc, tired from too much love and loose-nerved from general world conditions, can be a shameful thing served raw upon the shell.
M.F.K. Fisher
#44. If ELF don't exist, I would just be an empty shell
Leeteuk
#45. You want to know what I'm going to do to you if you consent to playing with me tonight?" His hot breath tickled the shell of her ear. "Anything I want.
Shelly Bell
#46. You don't give your mum enough credit for raising you, Elle. Look at you. Teenage sweetheart with a sugar shell and strychnine centre. We might as well finish speaking the truth now.
Shirley Marr
#47. I'm a bit surprised that the Raiders turned to Art Shell to be their new head coach, not because Shell isn't a good head coach - he had success before as the Raiders' head coach - but because he's been away from the game so long and the game has changed a lot in those years.
Ron Jaworski
#48. Eggs possess an elemental power. Their outer shell is earth. Their white is water. The membrane that lines the shell is air, and the yolk at the core is fire. The core of the egg preserves life and being, and therefore represents heaven and earth, while the white represents chaos.
Joanne Owen
#49. Actually, however, life begins less by reaching upward, than by turning upon itself. But what a marvelously insidious, subtle image of life a coiling vital principle would be! And how many dreams the leftward oriented shell, or one that did not conform to the rotation of its species, would inspire!
Gaston Bachelard
#50. Christ, he was empty, just a shell of himself. He had nothing to give, not even his seed.
Charlotte Featherstone
#51. I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#52. When it comes to scrapes, I'm what you might call a talented amateur. But I've gotten a good look at that women in and out of that fancy mechanical shell she wears. She's a pro. We're not playing the same sport.
James S.A. Corey
#53. music has, quite literally, saved my life and, I believe, the lives of countless others. It provides company when there is none, understanding where there is confusion, comfort where there is distress, and sheer, unpolluted energy where there is a hollow shell of brokenness and fatigue. And
James Rhodes
#54. I am shrunken and shriveled inside, a rotten chestnut hidden beneath a deceptively smooth shell
Laura Wiess
#55. You trip and lance
Your finger at a crab. It strikes. You rub
It inch-meal to a bilge of shell. You dance
Child-crazy over tub and gunnel, grasping
Your pitchfork like a trident, poised to stab
The greasy eel-grass clasping and unclasping
The jellied iridescence of the crab.
Robert Lowell
#56. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back to hit you.
Ernest Rutherford
#57. If you seek the kernel, then you must break the shell. An likewise, if you would know the reality of Nature, you must destroy the appearance, and the farther you go beyond the appearance, the nearer you will be to the essence.
Meister Eckhart
#58. You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you'll have no sense of self anymore, no memory, no ... anything. There's no chance at all of recovery. You'll just - exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever ... lost.
J.K. Rowling
#59. Please, Ally. Just stay," I whisper urgently, kissing the shell of her ear. "Stay, or tell me you don't want this. That I'm a fool for wanting you like I do.
S.L. Jennings
#60. Dawn was breaking over the horizon, shell pink and faintly gold ...
J.K. Rowling
#61. I can't do what you can do: I can't slip inside my shell and wait for things to pass.
Haruki Murakami
#62. The shell is America's most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early.
Anais Nin
#63. It's okay to play turtle for a while, as long as you don't get too fond of your shell.
Eileen Wilks
#64. Jack could feel the fissures beginning even now, the hard shell he'd promised to keep in place so that no one, ever, would get close enough to hurt him again.
Jodi Picoult
#65. In the end, they pardoned me and packed me off to a home for the shell-shocked. Shortly before the end of the war, I was discharged a second time, once again with the observation that I was subject to recall at any time.
George Grosz
#66. -Here's a pretty shell for you.
-Oh, thank you my baby.
-Look, here's another one!
-Thank you.
-Look at this pretty one!
-Thank you.
-Here's a REALLY pretty one.
-Um, thank you.
Jeffrey Brown
#67. The New or Future Eve is emptied of all inner life and turned into a shell. The bitter irony in this is that her perfection recalls nothing so much as a corpse.
Asti Hustvedt
#68. Tell me," he said when he was at her back, "what do you see when you look out at the water?"
"Endless possibilites."
His lips were ghosting over the shell of her ear, and she could feel the smile pulling at them, making goosebumps break out all over her arms. "That's how I see us.
London Miller
#69. If one could see an infinite distance, they would observe the back of their head. That is Einstein's theory in a nut-shell.
R. Alan Woods
#70. I watched as she stretched over the board to flick off a fallen leaf. Underneath her thin cotton shell, I saw how fragile the bones in her back were, far too sliver-prone, far too light to support a pair of wings.
Connie May Fowler
#71. Zak felt himself drawing inward like a snail, pulling back all his vulnerable parts, which was just about everything, and hiding inside his shell. Trouble was he didn't have a thick shell.
Barbara Elsborg
#72. Changed loves are but changed sorts of meat,
And when he hath the kernel eat,
Who doth not fling away the shell?
John Donne
#73. We Westerners will shell out our gold and even lay down our lives for the endangered mountain gorilla," he continued. "But does anyone raise a finger when five million human souls are sent to hell?
Elliott Garber
#74. I see everything as creative material. If I pick up a shell of a song that I wrote 10 years ago, all that matters is the reality of that material as it's living today.
Antony Hegarty
#75. Nobody really knows what the Bourne shell's grammar is. Even examination of the source code is little help.
Tom Duff
#76. Your friend the Turtle... He died a few years ago. The old idiot puked inside his shell and choked to death on a galaxy or two. Very sad, don't you think? But also quite bizarre.
Stephen King
#77. Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it.
Peter Thiel
#78. Hard as nails Stacy Killian was one like one of those Tootsie Roll Pops - hard shell, soft, chewy center.
Once a guy knew the center could be chewed, that's what they did. Chewed you up and spit you out. Or swallowed you, bite by bite. Goodbye respect. Goodbye self-esteem.
Erica Spindler
#79. I really started dreaming ... and broke out of my shyness when I got to Howard University. My first acting class was an Intro to Acting class with Professor Bay, who really broke me out of my shell, encouraged me to follow my dreams and make them a reality.
Lance Gross
#80. [Love that would] break open the hard shell of my lesser self.
Daisaku Ikeda
#81. When being a stunt double, my job has always a supportive role, which is interesting, really. Part of what I really like about it is making a situation where people can just come out of their shell and be super bad-ass. That's exciting!
Zoe Bell
#82. In leaving behind the kind of shell common to all undergraduates, indeed to most young men, they had, in one sense, taken more definite shape by each establishing conspicuously his own individual identity, thereby automatically drawing farther apart from each other.
Anthony Powell
#83. Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?
Mary Balogh
#84. As sunlight is for flowers, and sustenance for the mortal shell, music is for the human soul.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#85. I've felt the hate rise up in me ...
Kneel down and clear the stone of leaves ...
I wander out where you can't see ...
Inside my shell I wait and bleed ...
Slipknot
#86. I've been accused of being a shell designer - you start with a machine and enclose it. But in many cases, the shell is essential. A locomotive without a shell would be nonfunctional.
Raymond Loewy
#87. Sooner or later she'll figure out the truth: you're a shell of a man, all she has to do is knock against you to find out you're empty.
Nicole Krauss
#88. If you take away the fancy graphics of today's games, most of the time you're left with a shell of a game that has been done to death a million times.
Herman Leonard
#89. I lost something that I thought defined me and I felt like a shell of a person. Instead of trying to get it back, I had to figure out why I couldn't be whole all by myself.
Cecelia Ahern
#90. Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence.
Virginia Woolf
#91. The soul of man, like the bird in the shell, is still growing or ripening in sin or grace, till at last the shell breaks by death, and the soul flies away to the piece it is prepared for, and where it must abide forever.
John Flavel
#92. I don't want someone shoving his views down my throat, unless they're covered in a crunchy candy shell.
Stephen Colbert
#93. I think with acting, since I became an actor ... I, as a person, have become more confident and I have really come out of my shell somewhat ... and back to myself, you know.
Charlie Bewley
#94. An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind ... Something incredibly important - .. - had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life, but its absence
Haruki Murakami
#95. When it comes to affairs of the heart, you need to look deeper than the plastic-coated shell
Daisy James
#96. And the king could find no sleep. Not then, not now, and still he waits to this day in a shell of spent flesh... but they say he no longer dreams.
C.M. Hayden
#97. Beneath the ocean surface, bad things are happening. Increasing CO2 makes ocean water more acid, and that threatens to dissolve the shells of some ocean animals. Ouch, how'd you like to have your shell dissolve?
Mark Powell
#98. The sublime beauty was almost hidden withing the castle walls. She believed that the treasured things in life were often hard to find - a pearl in an oyster shell, a kind word in the heat of the moment.
F.C. Malby
#99. Sometimes we push ourselves. We take a workout and we use it as a way to crack open our shell, let the pain rush in and push out the stagnant wounds of the heart. Sometimes a workout sets you free.
Lauren Fleshman
#100. The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
Marshall McLuhan