Beauty can pierce one like pain.

Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts. . . .

Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts

She dealt her pretty words like blades — how glittering they shone — and every one unbared a nerve
or wantoned with a bone — She never deemed — she hurt — that — is not steel’s affair — a vulgar grimace in the flesh — how ill the creatures bear — To ache is human — not polite — the film upon the eye
mortality’s old custom — just locking up — to die.

Ah, ah, thy beauty! like a beast it bites,
Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites.

Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.

God will break your heart.

Beauty in this Iron Age must turn
From fluid living rainbow shapes to torn
And sootened fragments, ashes in an urn
On whose gray surface runes are traced by a Norn
Who hopes to wake the Future to arise
In Phoenix-fashion, and to shine with rays
To blast the sight of modern men whose dyes
Of selfishness and lust have stained our days...

Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can hurt like hell.

All books are either dreams or swords.

Terrible things breed in broken hearts. And I see in my mistress' eyes a fury that wont be calmed… It can’t be long before her sorrow turns, as sorrow always does, into rage.

The stubbornest of wills
Are soonest bended, as the hardest iron,
O'er-heated in the fire to brittleness,
Flies soonest into fragments, shivered through.

By the shattered hymen of Thor's bride!

When two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or bronze.