Top 100 Stiff Quotes
#1. German civility, which often seems stiff to us, shows an attentive and touching respect for the person that I often prefer to our offhandedness.
Adrienne Monnier
#2. I believe murder is 'tolerated with reservations.' " "Is anything illegal here?" Addison asked. "Library late fines are stiff. Ten lashes a day, and that's just for paperbacks.
Ransom Riggs
#3. Instrumental keys [on organs], introduced in the twelfth century, are so heavy and stiff that they must be played with clenched fists.
Joseph Gies
#4. I don't know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff wire.
Charles M. Blow
#5. Our employers today face numerous challenges and stiff competition from businesses all over the world.
Jim Gerlach
#6. With more insight into the English character, I poured out a stiff whisky and soda and placed it in front of the gloomy inspector.
Agatha Christie
#7. I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic, and the others either give me a stiff neck or lockjaw.
Tallulah Bankhead
#8. I very rarely wear suits, and only make one or two per season, so it's about wanting exceptional clothes that don't feel stiff. Fabric and garment washing are a big part of my design process for that reason. Everything needs to feel lived-in and comfortable.
Yigal Azrouel
#9. When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.
Hilary Mantel
#10. It's almost embarrassing, but I do have one trick for taking portraits on commission. I carry one of these little bicycle horns in my pocket, and once in a while, when someone is sour-faced or stiff, I blow my horn. It sort of shatters the barriers. It's silly, but it works.
Elliott Erwitt
#11. The cords of passion and desire weave a binding net around you. Worldly confrontation makes you stiff and inflexible. The trap of duality is tenacious. Bound, rigid, and trapped, you cannot experience liberation.
Laozi
#12. So many times I've wanted to crack up, standing there stiff while seven women are crawling round my toes fixing hems and the designer's having a freak-out because the denim cuffs are crooked. I'm on the verge of hysteria.
Helena Christensen
#13. I like causing trouble. It's the teddy boy in me. I used to be a teddy boy. Feeling slightly inferior and wanting to cause a bit of bother and get some action going on in the room rather than get bored stiff. Does that make sense?
Michael Gambon
#14. He asked with a stiff smile 'What is love?'
For me,' said Orianda, fumbling for a definition, 'for me it is a compound of anticipation and gratitude. When either of these two ingredients is absent love is dead.
A.E. Coppard
#15. She became a morality tale stiff with Schadenfreude, and so many columnists made allusion to Icarus that Private Eye ran a special column.
Robert Galbraith
#16. IF THE HOUSE IS BITTER COLD,
ALL THE FLUIDS THEREIN,
IF NOT FROZEN, ARE STIFF AND SLOW.
Jenny Holzer
#17. In beginning the world, if you don't wish to get chafed at every turn, fold up your pride carefully, put it under lock and key, and only let it out to air upon grand occasions. Pride is a garment all stiff brocade outside, all grating sackcloth on the side next to the skin.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#18. It's a very valuable function and requirement that you're performing, so have a great day and keep a stiff upper lip.
Dan Quayle
#19. Did you know that writing stories down kills them?
Of course it does, words aren't meant to be stiff, unchanging things.
N.K. Jemisin
#20. Mark Knopfler has an extraordinary ability to make a Schecter Custom Stratocaster hoot and sing like angels on a Saturday night, exhausted from being good all week and needing a stiff drink.
Douglas Adams
#21. When I was living in Los Angeles, I always booked a moisturizing milk-and-honey massage the day before flying to Spain. It was heaven - I never got dry plane skin or felt stiff from sitting in one position.
Carolina Herrera
#22. I think you need someone in your life you can depend on, someone you can confide in when things go to hell at work, someone to massage your tired feet and your stiff shoulders, someone to bring you tea and cook a meal once
in a while. Someone to be there for you.
Pamela Clare
#23. I don't write on topics that require a lot of urgency. But in 'Stiff,' I wanted to change people's hearts about organ donation. Whenever I get a chance, I try to talk about that.
Mary Roach
#24. I hate when your friends quit drinking on you, don't you? It's sad. I've lost more friends to AA than Liberace did to the virus. It's sad to see 'em go. You see a thirty day chip on your buddy's key ring, it's like seeing a toe tag on his cold, stiff corpse.
Doug Stanhope
#25. For 40 hours a week competition is awfully stiff but after that there's very little competition .
Zig Ziglar
#26. And if you must sacrifice yourself, do that by marrying me. I'm not an easy man. You'll earn your martyr's crown before you're done. Don't condemn both of us to an eternity of unhappiness just because you're too stiff-necked to face society's censure.
Anna Campbell
#27. Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.
Martin Heidegger
#28. The competition is very stiff. Brian Williams has proved himself as a credible news anchor (at NBC), and Bob Schieffer has done the same (at CBS). But as Peter and Tom (Brokaw) and Dan have always said about the competition, it makes us all better.
Bill Vaughan
#29. Always keep a big bottle of booze at your side. If a bird starts talking nonsense to you in the middle of the night pour yourself a stiff drink.
Edgar Allan Poe
#30. [ ... ] in his whole life he had never acted as he wished to act. He considered himself the administrator of his own immortality, and that responsibility tied him down and turned him stiff and prim.
Milan Kundera
#31. Well, I enjoy reality as much as the next man. It's just that in my case, fortunately, reality includes a good stiff belt every now and then.
Blake Edwards
#32. I am going to shrink and shrink until I am a dry fall leaf, complete with a translucent spine and brittle veins, blowing away in a stiff wind, up, up, up into a crisp blue sky.
Julie Gregory
#33. I went to college, grad school. I got an M.B.A., had a really cush corporate job. But I was just bored stiff. I didn't fit that mold.
Dean Karnazes
#34. Stiff. That's why you're strong, get it? - Tobias Eaton
Veronica Roth
#35. I pulled out the manuscript [from the envelope] and a great big stiff cardboard finger sprung up. This is someone that was so certain they would be rejected, they would be getting their revenge in advance. I was lucky - it could have been a pipe bomb.
Gardner Dozois
#36. I know they say that a stiff dick has no conscience, but I tell you now that some cunts have teeth ...
Stephen King
#37. Such kindness wasn't a gift but a goad, scraping against one's skin like a yoke of thorns. She would have preferred him stiff, defensive, even offensive.
Lauren Willig
#38. There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side, he was kind of a rather stiff, disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important.
John Boorman
#39. My name is Four," I say. "Call me 'Stiff' again and you and I will have a problem.
Veronica Roth
#40. Stiff-necked fools, you think you are cool to deny me for simplicity.
Bob Marley
#42. Well, it is strange that I who gave birth to her, and was a woman then, should be alive and merry now, and she lying there: so cold and stiff! Lord, Lord! - to think of it; it's as good as a play - as good as a play!
Charles Dickens
#43. There was a stiff bell-pull instead of a doorbell that Teddy had to yank hard for any result. They could hear a faint ringing somewhere beyond the fortress-like front door. No footsteps of anyone rushing to open it. It was a house in mourning, Teddy supposed.
Kate Atkinson
#44. As a stick, when once it is dry and stiff you may break it, but you can never bend it into a straighter posture; so doth the man become incorrigible who is settled and stiffened into vice.
Isaac Barrow
#45. Do you really think anyone needs some kind of notarized statement saying
'Dear Saint Peter, here's another stiff, pass him through the gates, signed, Father McGonnigill.' ... 'PS: He once had a hot dog on a Friday, but don't hold that against him.'
P.N. Elrod
#46. I do revel slightly in the fact that I am what I am - an English, middle-class, public-school-educated bloke. There is a reputation with that of being slightly stiff, but whoever gets to know me will see some other element - whether it be vulnerable or silly or camp.
Elliot Cowan
#47. After the Civil War, when blacks fought along whites to secure freedom for all, southern states enacted Black Codes, laws that restricted the civil rights and liberties of blacks. Central to the enforcement of these laws were the stiff penalties for blacks possessing firearms.
Niger Innis
#48. The Welsh were a god-cursed, stiff-necked, and utterly vexatious people, John said bitterly, but they did have an inexplicable ability to rise phoenixlike from the ashes of defeat, to soar upwards on wings too scorched for flight.
Sharon Kay Penman
#49. But now, I get up every morning and go to the gym because I don't like waking up stiff or in pain and wondering if my hip is going to hurt me.
Bo Jackson
#50. Unfortunately, the suit is so stiff, I can't do this with two hands, but I'm going to try a little sand-trap shot here.
Alan Shepard
#51. A hairy body, and arms stiff with bristles, give promise of a manly soul.
Juvenal
#52. Studying texts and stiff meditation can make you lose your Original Mind.
A solitary tune by a fisherman, though, can be an invaluable treasure.
Dusk rain on the river, the moon peeking in and out of the clouds;
Elegant beyond words, he chants his songs night after night.
Ikkyu
#53. The man may not be dead, but he was certainly stiff. And this had nothing to do with rigor mortis.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#54. It is important that you strive for humility, but not humiliation, for a cool, level-headed confidence, not a stiff, delusional arrogance.
Michael Johnson
#55. Which left me with the cheery knowledge that my father would wan tto spend time with me even if i were a cold, stiff corpse. not every daughter can say that, i bet!
Michele Jaffe
#56. What's it like to be that goofy little soldier, scared stiff, with his bayonet aimed at Christ? What's it like to have been a woman in a defense-plant job during World War II? What's it like to be a kid at the front lines? It's all funny and tragic at the same time
Studs Terkel
#57. Is anything illegal here?' Addison asked.
'Library late fines are stiff. Ten lashes a day, and that's just for paperbacks.
'There's a library?'
'Two. Though one won't lend because all the books are bound in human skin and quite valuable.
Ransom Riggs
#58. Yet here she sat on the sofa, working rather than dealing with the subject that seemed to fill the small flat, pressing against the walls, keeping the atmosphere perpetually stiff with tension. Commentators
Robert Galbraith
#59. I'm bored stiff by ballet. i can't bear those muscular white legs like unbaked plaited loaves, and I get quite hysterical every time one of the women sticks out her leg at right angles, and the man suddenly grabs it and walks round in a circle as though he were opening a tin.
Jilly Cooper
#60. There are two things I like stiff and one of them's jelly.
Nellie Melba
#61. He came to me then, wrapped his arms around me. I stayed stiff in his arms for a moment, and then I collapsed into his body. I clung to him. I let his strength and his nearness hold me. I let him hold me while I wept and screamed and wailed. I lost it completely, and Richard held me while I did it.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#62. The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.
Tracey Ullman
#63. To keep my back from getting stiff, I have a strict regime every morning of stretching and do yoga once a week and Pilates. 'Strictly Come Dancing' in 2008 was great for my fitness.
Cherie Lunghi
#64. Going down on a woman gives me a stiff neck, going down on a man gives me lockjaw and conventional sex gives me claustrophobia.
Tallulah Bankhead
#65. Where I went to school, Eton College, we had to wear dark trousers, a tailcoat, and a stiff, starched collar every day, and that was fine with me: Part of the reason I wanted to go there was because I've always loved dressing up.
Charlie Siem
#66. You'd be stiff if you'd been sitting on a brick wall all day, said Professor McGonagall.
J.K. Rowling
#67. Don't you just hate a phony-looking stiff? - Aunt Edna
Janet Evanovich
#68. My arms have mutinied against me - brutes!
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats,
My back's been stiff for hours, damned hours.
Death never gives his squad a Stand-at-ease.
Wilfred Owen
#69. A stiff breeze lifted the hair from my head. At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.
Sylvia Plath
#70. What am I writing for anyway? Is it like dreaming? Is it a benevolent process? Something that moves the past forward? And what about those people who say all you get from looking at the past is a stiff neck?
Selima Hill
#71. Darling, you know how I like the sight of a stiff one.
RoChe Montoya
#72. I tossed it on a pile with the coat, my stiff-with-cold jeans and the expensive scrap of silk that had been wedged up my ass for the past half hour.
Karen Chance
#73. The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down, and still fluttered down the snow.
James Russell Lowell
#74. The room is full of you! - As I came in
And closed the door behind me, all at once
A something in the air, intangible,
yet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick! -
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#75. I was 22 before I took my first dance class. I had never been athletic, so I was very stiff; I still am. I think what I got mostly from dance was carriage.
Morgan Freeman
#76. Smashed fly or the dead pig, gone stiff in the sun. It made his stomach feel funny even trying. "I don't think it's fair we've got to do Luke's chores now," Luke's other brother,
Margaret Peterson Haddix
#77. Sorry, Bramblestar!" Purdy gasped. "I'm too old and stiff for this. I can't get up or down, so I'd better live here, okay?
Erin Hunter
#78. After 'The Sisters Brothers,' I tried to write a contemporary story dealing with an investment adviser in New York City who moves to Paris. I did all this research, but after about a year and any number of pages written, I was bored stiff.
Patrick DeWitt
#79. An artist should paint from the heart, and not always what people expect. Predictability often leads to the dullest work, in my opinion, and we have been bored stiff long enough I think.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#80. Follow your instincts. Do the kind of writing you love to do and do best. 'Stiff' was an oddball book - I mean, a funny book about cadavers? - and I worried that it would be too unconventional. In the end, that's what has made it a success, I think.
Mary Roach
#81. Fuck! Is one expected to be a gentleman when one is stiff?
Marquis De Sade
#82. If the body is stiff that is understandable. But if the mind is also stiff then you can't get anywhere. The mind has to become flexible.
Geeta Iyengar
#83. You're gonna have to explain all this shit to me, Frank. You don't just tell a guy he's dead and get him to throw a stiff into the river for you and then we fuck off for donuts.
Carsten Stroud
#84. Height, five feet four inches, egg-shaped head carried a little to one side, eyes that shone green when he was excited, stiff military moustache, air of dignity immense!
Agatha Christie
#85. I did all the serious things that serious people do. The complacent face. The folded hands. The stiff spine. Check, check, double check.
Krista Ritchie
#86. I often take a brand-new suit or hat and throw it up against the wall a few times to get that stiff, square newness out of it.
Fred Astaire
#87. Cinderella studied the colonel. "Haven't you tired of history, or my voice?" she asked, her tone closer to sincerity than the stiff politeness she usually used. "Not yet," he smirked. Cinderella
K.M. Shea
#88. If people turn to look at you on the street, you are not well dressed, but either too stiff, too tight, or too fashionable.
Beau Brummell
#89. I thought that we were all like trees, flexible youths, saplings, who grow up heavy and stiff, spread seeds and get chopped down and turned into notebook paper.
Jill McCorkle
#90. Stiff-necked America, in flagrant rebellion against God, is indulging a caterwauling orgy of sinful maudlin cinementality on the 5th anniversary of God's 9/11 vengeance upon this evil nation for its sodomite sins!
Fred Phelps
#91. Just because I cut a lark with that stiff-rumped Exciseman you seem to think I'm as good as rope-ripe!
Georgette Heyer
#92. I have more fun hanging out with my friends who are musicians and rock stars. You know politicians by and large are pretty stiff, pretty rehearsed.
Jann Wenner
#93. Once a year, I take my whole wine team down to see the Giants, and we meet the players. I've never seen anyone pitch like Lincecum that can throw the ball and get through the front leg. He has that stiff front leg.
Tom Seaver
#94. I used to not really like going to the gym when I was playing tournaments because I'd be sore and stiff. But the more you keep doing it, the less soreness you have. And you actually start to enjoy it.
Rory McIlroy
#95. I can't work in an environment where it's a stiff hierarchy; that's not my kind of way.
Steven Rodney McQueen
#96. Good and gentle creatures do not offer a very stiff resistance, not for long, anyway. (from "A Gentle Creature")
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#97. I play until my fingers are blue and stiff from the cold, and then I keep on playing. Until I'm lost in the music. Until I am the music
notes and chords, the melody and harmony. It hurts, but it's okay because when I'm the music, I'm not me. Not sad. Not afraid. Not desperate. Not guilty.
Jennifer Donnelly
#98. I can't believe you didn't tell me you have a phone."
"It is a penis move," said Ethan agreed in a stiff voice.
"Dick move, baby," said Remmy
Jill Myles
#99. I couldn't reach her. I was never able to reach her. Maybe she moved at a pace too fast. Maybe she was too sad. She held herself stiff, a lacquered lady. I think because I couldn't feel her, I couldn't feel myself.
Lauren Slater
#100. Ireland sober is Ireland stiff. Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me! Your prayers. I sonht zo! Madammangut!
James Joyce
