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41 " Everybody oughta have a dog," he said thoughtfully, his hand still scratching Beau. " Dogs teach you love and kindness. They remind you what's important." He nodded and took a sip of his coffee. " A life ain't much of a life without a dog in it, s'what I always said. "
42 " Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom. "
― Tahir Shah , Beyond The Devil's Teeth
43 " When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings. "
― Elizabeth Gilbert , Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
44 " We are all ghosts," Morris Klapper said at last. " We are conceived in a moment of death and born out of ghost wombs, and we play in the streets with other little ghosts, chanting ghost-rhymes and scratching to become real. We are told that life is full of goals and that, although it is sadly necessary to fight, you can at least choose your war. But we learn that for ghosts there can only be one battle: to become real. A few of us make it, thus encouraging other ghosts to believe it can be done. "
45 " A scratching of melody comes from the radio, chords rising open as the land that carries us, rhythm mimicking our passage down the road, harmony making this life seem it should be only that. We sing along to what songs have always been about- beginning, going on, breaking up, forgiving, We sing in missed words and broken phrases as glints of tiger moths fly at us like snow, streaking the windshield over. "
― Susan Froderberg , Old Border Road
46 " there were moments throughout the whole day when she had to shake herself because she found her thoughts climbing over her like creeping ivy, scratching and biting into her skin and entangling her in their morbid clutch. Because... wasn't ot true now that not only was she not human but she was kind of a 'thing' rather than Jinn? The Seal was an object with no emotion or thought or feeling. It has one purpose. To command the Jinn. What did that really make her then? "
― Samantha Young , Smokeless Fire (Fire Spirits, #1)
47 " The scratching came from the attic. At night, when Rory turned out the light I would lie awake and wait for it to skit, skit, skit lightly across the floorboards above our heads and down behind the water pipes. "
― Kate Chisman , Creep
48 " To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king’s whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn’t, and I am dead. "
― Hilary Mantel , Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2)
49 " Toy is talking and this is why I love her. She can go on about herself ceaselessly and like the scratching of a branch against the window at night, the steady insistence of it is comforting. She has stories without beginnings, stories that trail off, stories that crisscross and contradict and dead end.Toy is the star of her stories. Events orbit her like a constellation. "
― Erica Lorraine Scheidt , Uses for Boys
50 " They laid up in the shade of a rock shelf until past noon, scratching out a place in the gray lava dust to sleep, and they set forth in the afternoon down the valley following the war trail and they were very small and they moved very slowly in the immensity of that landscape.Come evening they hove toward the rimrock again and Sproule pointed out a dark stain on the face of the barren cliff. It looked like the black from old fires. The kid shielded his eyes. The scalloped canyon walls rippled in the heat like drapery folds. "
― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
51 " Young men and women are causing wealth loss to their generation because they are sitting on inert ideas, bottled-up potential energy and scratching the ground when they should be gliding the skies and perambulating with the stars. These people are so disillusioned they live life without any urgency. "
― Nana Awere Damoah , I Speak of Ghana
52 " Shit, man, if you see a dog scratching at the dirt trying to dig something up, walk away real fast,” he said, then pulled a little square of paper from his pocket and swallowed whatever was folded inside. "
― Cole Alpaugh , The Spy's Little Zonbi
53 " Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.…'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. "
― David Hume
54 " The world is a clock winding down.I hear it in the wind’s icy fingers scratching against the window. I smell it in the mildewed carpeting and the rotting wallpaper of the old hotel. And I feel it in Teacup’s chest as she sleeps. The hammering of her heart, the rhythm of her breath, warm in the freezing air, the clock winding down. "
― Rick Yancey , The Infinite Sea (The 5th Wave, #2)
55 " I've never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they're functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers. "
― Dani Shapiro , Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
56 " The resource of generational history is accorded little attention our society, which seems ever more obsessed with making “new” and “better” synonymous. From my family I became aware of the importance of passing along wisdom from one generation to the next. Yet despite the increasing proliferation of digital recording and other communication technologies, we’re passing on less knowledge today than our parents did through the oral tradition alone. We’re drowning in photographs and videos, capturing every mundane moment of our birthdays, holidays, and vacations. Yet these can be no more than pleasant distraction, only scratching the surface of our real relationships. "
― Ralph Nader , The Seventeen Traditions
57 " But the wireless," asked Momulla. " What has the wireless to do with our remaining here?" " Oh yes," replied Gust, scratching his head. He was wondering if the Maori were really so ignorant as to believe the preposterous lie he was about to unload upon him. " Oh yes! You see every warship is equipped with what they call a wireless apparatus. It lets them talk to other ships hundreds of miles away, and it lets them listen to all that is said on these other ships. "
58 " One thing I've noticed since I quit drinking is that a person usually has two or three sets of impulses scratching away at some internal door at any given time. If you're sober--if you're alert, and paying attention to those impulses, and not yielding to the instinct to anesthetize them--you can receive a lot of guidance about where to go, what to do next in life. "
― Caroline Knapp , Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs
59 " Nathan seemed to have absorbed his sense of journalistic ethics from old movies about newspaper reporters. For Naomi, internet sampling ad scratching was a completely valid form of journalism, presenting no ethical clouds on its open-source horizon. "
― David Cronenberg , Consumed
60 " Once again he was aware of eyes staring fixedly at him. He glanced sideways into the long, pointed face of Goodboy Bindle Featherstone, rearing up in a pose best described as The Last Puppy in the Shop.To his astonishment, he found himself reaching over and scratching it behind its ears, or at least behind the two spiky things at the sides of its head which were presumably its ears. It responded with a strange noise that sounded like a complicated blockage in a brewery. He took his hand away hurriedly.“It's all right,” said Lady Ramkin. “It's his stomachs rumbling. That means he likes you.”To his amazement, Vimes found that he was rather pleased about this. As far as he could recall, nothing in his life before had thought him worth a burp. "
― Terry Pratchett , Guards! Guards! (Discworld, #8; City Watch #1)