Shell Quotes

“The bird dares to break the shell, then the shell breaks open and the bird can fly openly. This is the simplest principle of success. You dream, you dare and and you fly.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“If our splintered attention has led us to oblivion and blindness; and the shell has replaced the substance, it may be enlightening to deep-dive into the roots of our negative qualities and find a surprising guideline for the creation of new horizons. ("Not without my shadow")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“After tail spinning into chaos, one needs a bolt-hole, to resource and ‘challenge’ oneself, break free from the haunting constrictions, squirrel back into bouncy and buoyant surroundings and enjoy the many laugh-out-loud-moments of the day. As soon as one manages to wobble out of one’s shell, everything may click into place again and the radiance and glare of the bright side of life might show again. ("Imbroglio")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“When we crave the touch and the feel of an unfeigned world, we must not waver and put our quest on the back burner, but scratch anxiously the shining shell of a fair-weather world, find out how to discover real values; and foster a candid quality of our desire ("Absence of Desire" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“A creature that hides and “withdraws into its shell,” is preparing a “way out.” This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent. If we remain at the heart of the image under consideration, we have the impression that, by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, of being.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“A thorough inspection of someone you believed to be loveable will send you back into your shell if all you saw in their life was all bullshit.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“It's strange. How hollow i feel. Like there might be echoes inside of me. Like I'm one of those chocolate rabbits they used to sell around Easter, the ones that were nothing more than a sweet shell encapsulating a world of nothing. I'm like that. I encapsulate a world of nothing.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

“He had the same look on his face that I had every day when I looked in the mirror. He was nothing more than a shell of a person.”
― Amy Lichtenhan, Pulled

“This empty shell holds nothing but the echoes of what was.”
― Jenim Dibie, The Calligraphy of God: A Collection of Love Poems

“Just before the Clear Air Turbulence went back into warp and its crew sat down at the table, the ship expelled the limp corpse of Zallin. Where it had found a live man in a suit, it left a dead youth in shorts and a tattered shirt, tumbling and freezing while a thin shell of air molecules expanded around the body, like an image of departing life.”
― Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas

“Like the turtle's shell, the sense of self serves as a shield against stimulation and as a burden which limits mobility into possibly dangerous areas. The turtle rarely has to think about what's on the other side of his shell; whatever it is, it can't hurt him, can't even touch him. So, too, adults insist on the shell of a consistent self for themselves and their children and appreciate turtles for friends; they wish to be protected from being hurt or touched or confused or having to think. If a man can rely on consistency, he can afford not to notice people after the first few times. But I imagined a world in which each individual might be about to play the lover, the benefactor, the sponger, the attacker, the friend: and once known as one of the next day he might yet be anything. Would we pay attention to this person? Would life be boring? Would life be livable? I saw then clearly for the first time that the fear of failure keeps us huddled in the cave of self - a group of behavior patterns we have mastered and have no intention of risking failure by abandoning.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man

“Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?”
― Mary Balogh, A Secret Affair

“What can we expect from an empty shell
Where many hearts of pearl once beat to dwell
Waves fail to break hard layer's bond of love
Wailing shore sends memoir to the sky above”
― Munia Khan

“Everything must break open in order to live. The seed must break open in order for the tree to grow. The egg must break open in order for life to emerge. The Earth must be turned and the cloud must burst. You were never meant to stay in your shell.”
― Thomas Lloyd Qualls, Painted Oxen

“You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it'll become too small."
"Then what?" I ask.
"Well, then you'll have to find a larger shell to live in."
I consider this for a moment. "What if it's too small but you still want to live there?"
She sighs. "Gracious, child, what a question. I suppose you'll either have to be brave and find a new home or you'll have to live inside a broken shell.”
― Christina Baker Kline, A Piece of the World

“Your friend the Turtle... He died a few years ago. The old idiot puked inside his shell and choked to death on a galaxy or two. Very sad, don't you think? But also quite bizarre.”
― Stephen King, It

“Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance

“The nautilus shell was exquisite, brown and white and perfectly striped. The math that lay like a dazzling creation spell over all who lived in the sea showed clearly in the spiral, each cell as great as the sum of the two previous sections. Everything in the ocean was a thing of beauty and numbers, even in death.
Mermaids could live for a long time, but their bodies became foam that dissipated into nothing when they died.
The poor little mollusk who lived in this shell had a very short life, but his shell could last for centuries.
Ariel sighed and brushed her fingers over it, feeling strangely melancholy despite the triumph she literally held in her hands. Years of being mute could be swept away in a second. Years of frustration, years of silent crying, years of anger.
And then what?
If she destroyed it, what would it change?”
― Liz Braswell, Part of Your World

“Open the scroll of conch and find the text
That lies behind the priestly susurrus.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“A nautilus shell. I've never found one before."
It was a nice big one, a rare find, not too damaged by the battering waves. Alex couldn't know it, but it was Mamma's favorite kind of shell. The nautilus is a symbol of harmony and peace, she used to say.
"You can have it if you want," he said, holding the shell out to her.
"No. You found it." Rosa kept her hands at her sides even though she wanted it desperately.
"I'm not good at keeping things." He wound up as if to throw it back into the surf.
"Don't! If you're not going to keep it, I will," Rosa said, grabbing it from him.
"I wasn't really going to throw it away," he said. "I just wanted you to have it.”
― Susan Wiggs, Summer by the Sea

“Once I used to hide in my shell
In the depths, I was safe.
I could hear the echo of distant waves
but it is also quite bizarre
one day it became too small
I had to see the world
now the shell holds nothing
but the echoes of what was.”
― Rolf van der Wind

“A beautiful, swirled brown and white shell like the one Ursula used to wear, but larger. A whelk, not a nautilus. Vareet picked it up in wonder, turning it over in her hands, admiring its gleam in the moonlight. On a whim she put it to her ear.
Her eyes widened.
In the depths of the shell, she could hear what must have been the echo of distant waves... and also the song of a mermaid.”
― Liz Braswell, Part of Your World

“[she] might have been a shell, and his words water rubbing against her ears, as water rubs a shell on the edge of a rock.”
― Virginia Woolf, The voyage out virginia woolf: Classic Virginia Woolf novels

“Failure is information encased in a shell of pain.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“To be a poet is to be struck with wonder upon wonder as the waves leave the shores for everything that bids adieu leaves something behind, as a shell on the sands.”
― Jayita Bhattacharjee

“What's happened to her? The person that she is seems like a shell designed to cover up the person that Harold once knew her to be.”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“And the king could find no sleep. Not then, not now, and still he waits to this day in a shell of spent flesh... but they say he no longer dreams.”
― C.M. Hayden, The Stars That Form Us

“It is very difficult to convince a person to come out of his conversative shell, unless he doesn't feel discomfort there.”
― Tarif Naaz

“She believed in the miraculous. Or she had, until she reached an age when, all of a sudden, she realized that the life she was living was, in fact, her life. The clay of her being, so long infinitely malleable, had been formed, hardened into what now seemed a palpable, unchanging object, a shell she inhabited.”
― Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife

“Shell shock victims tend to go crazy in their fifties.”
― Steven Magee