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1 " Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper. "
― Erica Jong
2 " My soul is the gods’; my heart is yours.Leiard smiled—a sly, secretive smile. It was an expression she had never seen him wear before. Was this just her mind embellishing the mood she sensed from him? I’ve always suspected souls were a concept the gods invented to encourage people to serve them. In fact, I once had a conversation with a god in which he admitted that — "
― Trudi Canavan
3 " Brant had said my embellishing constituted a disservice to history and its players. But I believed the opposite. Marooning them on the forlorn island of Only What We Know, a place whose boundaries were determined by the scant information provided by a handful of surviving documents, seemed the greater disservice. I paid homage with my imagination, and hoped I might get visitors to do the same. "
― Leah Hager Cohen , House Lights
4 " The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted, let yourself go and you started embellishing your own sobs. "
― Richard Yates , Revolutionary Road
5 " When he recalls it in later years, he will wonder if he is distorting it, embellishing it, because each time he consciously recalls her, that forms a new memory, a new imprint to be stacked on top of the previous one. He fears that too much handling will make it crumble. "
― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone
6 " ...he starts telling them about our day, embellishing it so that it almost sounds fun. It's how all good travel stories are born. Nightmares spun into punch lines. "
― Gayle Forman , Just One Year (Just One Day, #2)
7 " ..it sounded very good and very false at the same time, so that you had the feeling that even if was true, he was touching only on the very highest points and maybe embellishing those a little. "
― Bill Pronzini , The Vanished (Nameless Detective, #2)
8 " Evil should not be, Detective Vera. Truly never can be. But in defining it as such, an inherent human bond with negativity confirms its very existence. Its mere acknowledgement cancels its credibility. Evil is nothing—the lack of anything of substance— made concrete as a balance to everything else. Evil is not, yet it is a part ofeach human, because humans welcome its participation in their lives. They speak of it in anger or disgust, fear or even wonder— the most appropriate response— giving it a stronger foundation with every passing thought it distorts. Though within their pliable minds, they welcome it with the glee of the ignorant, nurturing the unthinkable, thinking the unimaginable, imagining the most horrid, abysmal designs, embellishing them with an insidious veracity until evil is as substantial a reality as their next breath. I strive for something else, beyond evil’s claustrophobic clutches. I strive to transcend evil by becoming pure nothing. I strive as my followers strived.” He paused, his ideology a cancer, spreading… “I am, yet I strive to not be. Do you understand, comrade?” His tone suggested fellowship, disciples of the same obscene religion. ... "
9 " So now, not only did my best friend leave, but the cheerleaders and their mindless followers assumed I was personally responsible for the petition (which, yeah, I was) and started being openly rude to me - shutting doors in my face, leaving nasty notes on my desk and in my locker, making fun of me when I could obviously hear them.That's when I started keeping really quiet in class, and finding ways to show the other kids I wasn't afraid of them - like staring them straight in the eye when they looked at me, taking a step toward them when they talked to me, or walking right up to them and getting their personal space if I heard them say my name. Saying the meanest things I could think of whenever I had the chance - repeating rumors, embellishing them. I found out Kira Conroy had been arrested for shoplifting at the mall, and made sure everyone knew about it. The girl who burped in a boy's face during her first kiss, the girl who tripped and fell off the stage at the Miss Teen California pageant - I shared those stories the moment I heard them.All's fair in war, right?Suddenly I wasn't a nobody anymore.I was a somebody.Somebody everyone was afraid of. "
― Katie Alender , Bad Girls Don't Die (Bad Girls Don't Die, #1)
10 " You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. "
― Eugene H. Peterson , The Message Remix (Bible in Contemporary Language)