Weekend Words: Stab
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson defended himself this week against charges from the media that he did not try to stab another teenager in his youth.
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson defended himself this week against charges from the media that he did not try to stab another teenager in his youth.
True friends stab you in the front.
—Oscar Wilde
If I should stab the patient faith
So sure I’d come–so sure I’d come,
It listening, listening, went to sleep
Telling my tardy name,–
—Emily Dickinson, LXXVI
Fucking bastard, I’ll stab you in the chest with this pencil.
―Koushun Takami, Battle Royale
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?
—Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollack
The thrust or stab is risky because it can kill and yet not stop. In most street encounters, killing is not desired, but stopping is. The cut will stop but not kill.
―Hank Reinhardt, Hank Reinhardt’s Book of Knives: A Practical and Illustrated Guide to Knife Fighting
Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.
—William Faulkner
No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.
—Isaac Babel, Guy de Maupassant
You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not — silence is the sharper sword.
—Samuel Johnson
Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.
—Ed Gardner, Duffy’s Tavern
The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one’s pocket for another meal.
—Henry Miller
If beams from happy human eyes
Have moved me not; if morning skies,
Books, and my food, and summer rain
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:-
Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take
And stab my spirit broad awake;
—Robert Louis Stevens, “The Celestial Surgeon”
But fundamentally it is the same careful grouping of suspects, the same utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poignard just as she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests; the same ingenue in fur-trimmed pajamas screaming in the night to make the company pop in and out of doors and ball up the timetable; the same moody silence next day as they sit around sipping Singapore slings and sneering at each other, while the flat-feet crawl to and fro under the Persian rugs, with their derby hats on.
—Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”
“The male frog in mating season,” said Crake, “makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs—it’s been documented—discover if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier and the small frog appears much larger than it really is.”
“So?”
“So that’s what art is for the artist, an empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.”
—Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee; For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar’s angel.
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him!
This was the most unkindest cut of all.
For when the noble Caesar saw him stab,
Ingratitude, more strong than traitors’ arms,
Quite vanquished him. Then burst his mighty heart.
—William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
