Taut Quotes

#1. Her heart was beating a marathon somewhere in the region of her throat, her skin felt hot and stretched taut over her bones, and she was damp in places she was tolerably certain unmarried gentlewomen were not supposed to be damp in.

Gail Carriger

#2. Later, when they would spend straight hours conversing in the dark, Jane would realize that Henry kissed the way he talked- his entire attention taut, focused, intensely hers.

Shannon Hale

#3. Straddling him intimately, he slides his hands up my thighs, pushing the silk aside and caressing my pale, exposed skin. Even against his uniform, I can feel his hardness. His body feels taut and poised for action.

Felicity Brandon

#4. And then Margo proceeded to lie. "He's actually my cousin," she said. Then she sidled up to me, out her hand aroud my waste so that I could feel each of her fingers taut against my hip bone, and she added, "And my lover.

John Green

#5. Sugar's cheek was smooth and taut beneath the veil. It felt like one of these netted onions in a grocery store.

Anne Tyler

#6. Down the hall the children slept three to a bedroom; Hattie could almost hear them growing, their wrists lengthening and poking out beyond the cuffs of their sleeves, their feet outgrowing their shoes, their shoulders widening and pulling the fabric of their coats taut.

Ayana Mathis

#7. Ammu watched over them fiercely. Her watchfulness stretched her, made her taut and tense. She was quick to reprimand her children, but even quicker to take offense on their behalf.

Arundhati Roy

#8. Alienation and loneliness became a cable that stretched hundreds of miles long, pulled to the breaking point by a gigantic winch. And through that taut line, day and night, he received indecipherable messages.

Haruki Murakami

#9. He touched me with such reverence, his fingertips light and curious as they cruised up my spine while his mouth was bold and knowing, his tongue lavishing taut, puckered skin with deadly precision.

Linda Kage

#10. But it was something else, too, that I wanted to extend: the taut and pleasant silence in the car, the stale heat raising vapours of leather. The warped image of myself in the side mirrors, so I caught only the quantity of hair, the freckled skin of my shoulder. I took on the shape of a girl.

Emma Cline

#11. He's lithe and tanned and taut. But to my eye he's lost something. He has a synthetic quality, like orange soda instead of freshly squeezed juice. It's orangey and bubbly and it quenches your thirst, but it leaves a bitter aftertaste. And it's not good for you.

Sophie Kinsella

#12. Willpower is breath and heartbeat of life; Life blooms in the girdle of taut willpower.

Praveen Kumar

#13. The assassin crouched atop one of the shorter, thicker pillars, his body a curve of taut muscles beneath nondescript gray clothes. He looked more like a weapon than a person.

Leah Cypess

#14. I saw myself then - sour, silly, difficult, lovely in his eyes. I drew him to me, felt him shudder as our bodies came together, skin against skin, felt the heat of his lips, his tongue, hands moving until the need between us drew taut and anxious as a bowstring waiting for release.

Leigh Bardugo

#15. As I quietly stare off into space, eyes glazed over and brow thoughtfully taut, know that I am going about my business. I am a storyteller. Daydreaming is the best part of my job.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#16. In spite of their friendship, they were so far apart, the bowstring was so taut between them: a seeing man and a blind man, they walked side by side ; the blind man's unawareness of his own blindness was a consolation only to himself.

Hermann Hesse

#17. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies.

Nathanael West

#18. In my mind, I saw a string stretching from Henry's heart at Quiet Waters to my heart. It was taut and it vibrated with Henry's worries and fears and I felt them all.
Deeply. I felt them all.

Laura Anderson Kurk

#19. Stubbornness is surely just taut-jawed, clenched-fisted madness.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#20. He brought his lips to my ear. "I would have been gentle with you, though." I shuddered as I closed my eyes. Every inch of my body went taut as his words echoed through me. "I would have had you moaning my name throughout it all. And I would have taken a very, very long time, Feyre.

Sarah J. Maas

#21. Grabbing his very fine, very taut ass in my hands, I squeezed. "I need more coffee to deal with your gift, ace."
Chapter 8, pg 131

Sylvia Day

#22. The bow kept taut will quickly break, kept loosely strung, it will serve you when you need it.

Phaedrus

#23. The air, which had been stretched taut with excitement, relaxed again.

Chinua Achebe

#24. tee that stretched taut against his powerful

Kate Meader

#25. His long fingers curled around the back of her lace thong, pulling the material taut against her wet fold. "I'm a big guy, and you know I always deliver.

Avery Flynn

#26. The Eleventh Plague hits disturbingly close to home An excellent, taut debut novel.

Suzanne Collins

#27. When the United States wants cheap labor, Mexicans respond. When the employment market north of the border is glutted, the barbed wire gets taut, the border patrols fix bayonets, the vigilantes get busy, and the walls go up.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#28. These cords that God makes, Reverend Bauxite thought, we stand holding one end while they run taut into the darkness.

Brian Francis Slattery

#29. Parents sat gloomy and still, like rows of turnips in a grocer's box. Their little criminals sat with them, tapping LOLs on their phones, or milled in the yard outside stinking of Lynx and taut nonchalance. Solicitors strode in and out in a twist of slacks and briefcases.

Lisa McInerney

#30. He's a contradiction: taut magic coiled to strike, gentleness at war with severity, a tongue as sharp as a whip's edge, yet skin so soft he could be swathed in clouds.

A.G. Howard

#31. All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.

Shirley Jackson

#32. The old days, they arrive back in the oddest ways, suddenly taut, breaking the surface, a salmon leap.

Colum McCann

#33. He'd been an odd one, that boy with the camera. Such a distinctive physique: pale skin so taut on his skeleton, holding himself with a shy hunch, not ugly as such but certainly not handsome, with a demeanor eager to cause no trouble, to attract no attention.

Ali Shaw

#34. Shakespeare's felicity is so often taught
it is easy to overlook how taut
the sinews in his neck must
have been when he grasped his pen, or the musk
that exuded from the fat of his chin
below a somewhat chthonic grin
life wrestled death on his desk when he composed.

B.J. Ward

#35. For my part, I like live theater best when it's taut, concentrated and intimate.

Terry Teachout

#36. Her body feels different, no longer taut and sinewy but sponge-like fluid. Saturated. It has a different energy, a deep orangy-like pink, like the inside of a hibiscus.

Margaret Atwood

#37. The backs of his hands remind him of paper burning in the fireplace, the moment the taut membrane goes slack into a thousand wrinkles, just before it withers to ash and air.

Barbara Kingsolver

#38. His leap was exact, mathematical. The initial arc - head tucked between taut arms that spread out gradually like wings - was as graceful as a swan dive.

Juan Filloy

#39. Gritty and witty, The Chicago Way is done the classic Raymond Chandler Way. Harvey's taut plot, snappy prose, and memorable characters make this debut novel a real winner.

Kathy Reichs

#40. Sometimes it seems to me that I shall never write out all the books I have in my head, because of the strain. The devilish thing about writing is that it calls upon every nerve to hold itself taut. This is exactly what I cannot do

Virginia Woolf

#41. She wore a pleated skirt, a white cotton blouse, and simple black shoes with knee high stockings. At the arc of each step, the skirt would rise to expose a few inches of her taut thighs. Neither Earl nor Duke could recall what Chad was wearing.

A. Lee Martinez

#42. In my eye, men appear at their most powerful when they strain to reach that momentary perfection. Every muscle and sinew is taut, and for them there is nothing else except their bodies and the sensations. Fighting in concert, side by side, it is as if they storm the gates of Heaven demanding entry.

W.A. Hoffman

#43. Humorists are not humorous twenty-four hours a day. In fact, when you get to know them well, they are often not humorous at all. They tend to be hypersensitive, taut, neurotic creatures driven by God know what obscure compulsion to earn their living the hard way.

Margaret Halsey

#44. The golden thread of reason that used to be stretched taut to mark the boundary between the known and the unknown is now routinely disrespected.

Al Gore

#45. She was like a wounded animal, he thought, looking at her. Fear and pain were in every line of her - in the taut stillness of her form and in her watchful, wary stare. She wanted to be alone, to lick her wounds, and though she'd been that way all along, he couldn't let her stay that way.

Laura Lee Guhrke

#46. Enthusiasm is everything. It must be taut and vibrating like a guitar string.

Pele

#47. The great trains howling from track to track all night. The taut and telegraphic murmur of ten thousand city wires, drawn most cruelly against a city sky. The rush of city waters, beneath the city streets. The passionate passing of the night's last El.

Nelson Algren

#48. It is always a taut moment in a foreign country waiting to see if your English-speaking guide speaks English ...

Peg Bracken

#49. Hunter's stomach was perfection - each taut muscle tight and totally lickable. Not that I'd ever licked a man's stomach before, but now I got why someone would want to. I was in six-pack heaven.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#50. No Way Back is my kind of novel - a tough, taut thriller - Mofina knows the world he writes about.

Michael Connelly

#51. David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that's both erotic and hypnotic ...

Miriam Toews

#52. How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted. How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future.

Carol Shields

#53. When the music comes, you try to see it shining between your eyes. Like threads stretched taut and the notes as colored beads threaded on. When you get very good, it's as if you can see inside the music, through it. You bring the music alive, bring it into being. As if you're the one composing.

Anna Smaill

#54. We may not be as perfect as we used to be,' says Raffe, 'but it's all relative.'
I try to give him a dirty look, but I can't help but laugh. 'Yes, I'm laughing at you.'
Raffe pulls me closer and kisses me again. I melt into his taut body. I can't help myself. I'm not even sure I should try

Susan Ee

#55. To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.

Alan W. Watts

#56. Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer Said once about the long toil that goes like blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls, Limp as bindweed, if it break at all Life's iron crust Man, you must sweat And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build Your verse a ladder.

R.S. Thomas

#57. Sebastian lay a few feet away from her, on his back. There was a great blackened hole across the front of his chest. He turned his head toward her, his face taut and white with pain, and her heart contracted.
His eyes were green.

Cassandra Clare

#58. The instantaneous shift from calm to calamity. The slowing of time. Every sense suddenly wire-taut and screaming.

Robert Galbraith

#59. Not that the man needed clothes. God meant for that piece of perfection to have nothing masking the luscious, tanned flesh stretched taut over beautiful muscles.

Rena Marks

#60. If one of these, if a hundred of them, a thousand, came too soon or failed to thrive or were born incomplete somehow, born blue or ill made or with reason's taut string already snapped, it was of little matter in the long history of God's bustling. There

Alice McDermott

#61. It had not been a long journey, but the memory of it filled her like an infection. She had felt tethered by time to the city behind her, so that the minutes stretched out taut as she moved away, and slowed the farther she got, dragging out her little voyage.

China Mieville

#62. His attention seemed tied to her face by a taut string.

John Steinbeck

#63. ...My taut heart
lurches heavily, like a sack in a cart, clattering
downhill, towards a cliff, towards an abyss!
It can't be stopped!

Vladimir Nabokov

#64. What I took to be the norm
taut, smooth, supple
was the transient special case of youth. To me, the old were a separate species, like sparrows or foxes.

Ian McEwan

#65. Becoming Richard Pryor is a compulsively readable book that sets a new gold standard for American biography. Scott Scaul's research is extraordinary; his writing is taut, elegant, and insightful; and he captures both the hilarity and pain that made Richard Pryor such a towering figure,

Debby Applegate

#66. Broad shoulders fit snugly under his white shirt, and taut muscles flex in his arm as he grips a tray. He's not a muscle-bound freak though, thank God. I don't like that "I have boulders in my biceps" look that a lot of guys seem to favor these days.

Siobhan Davis

#67. I took a closer look. Jesus had piercing blue eyes, dark hair that hung in a flawless mess, his body was emaciated and taut, his hands and feet dripped with blood, and nothing but a gauzy loincloth hid what looked like a nice package underneath.
"Sexy," I said. "He looks like a rock star.

Tiffanie DeBartolo

#68. I try to give him a dirty look, but I can't help but laugh. "Yes, I'm laughing at you." Raffe pulls me closer and kisses me again. I melt into his taut body. I can't help myself. I'm not even sure I should try. My whole world turns into Raffe sensations as our lips explore each other.

Susan Ee

#69. The force that makes the winter grow Its feathered hexagons of snow , and drives the bee to match at home Their calculated honeycomb, Is abacus and rose combined. An icy sweetness fills my mind , A sense that under thing and wing Lies, taut yet living , coiled, the spring .

Jacob Bronowski

#70. The end of anything is a relief. In every relationship, even the most valuable, there are certain unpleasant tensions - and the ending of it snaps those taut inner wires.

Kathleen Winsor

#71. Tides is a rich, taut, suspenseful, and funny exploration of two worlds, selkie and human. It's full of mystery but it's also so fully imagined that a reader can jump right in. Betsy Cornwell is a terrific new talent with a boundless imagination.

Valerie Sayers

#72. The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

Yukio Mishima

#73. In one of our concert grand pianos, 243 taut strings exert a pull of 40,000 pounds on an iron frame. It is proof that out of great tension may come great harmony.

Theodore E. Steinway

#74. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility ...

Ayn Rand

#75. You fool, You have been dangling For such a long time! When will you seize the opportunity Or feel the necessity To untangle the taut knot Of your bondage-life?

Sri Chinmoy

#76. But no monk am I in my head, God grant me pardon," he whispered. His body drew closer, velvet and taut elegance. "My confessor has chastised me oft, and bade me study on my sins at length. And so, lady"--he kissed her, the hunger in it sinking down through her like a comet falling--"I have studied.

Laura Kinsale

#77. My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often - in fact, mostly - at the expense of everything else in my life.

Stan Getz

#78. The paint has a skin to it, here taut and glossy, there wrinkled, abraded, scarred. It is pierced, abraded, scraped. A line drawn through it will go through half a dozen states, from the furry bloom of crusted charcoal to a blind furrow, cutting a channel in to soft paint below.

Andrew Forge

#79. There is only continual motion. If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad. There is so much, and I am torn in different directions, pulled thin, taut against horizons too distant for me to reach. Swift, ceaseless pace. Will I never rest in sunlight again - slow, languid & golden with peace?

Sylvia Plath