Quotes About Hand Gestures

“I think most women, especially women who work hard and have a lot on their mind, prefer a man to come home, lift her off her feet and take her against the wall rather than hand her some bullshit flowers and pussyfoot around with sweet gestures all night.”

— Vi Keeland

“I'm the master of distractions. A couple of hand gestures and BAM! I'll pull the underwear clean off your butt.”

— Si Robertson

“She believed not in divine salvation but in the proposition that we poor mortals are fully capable of saving ourselves, if conditions and inclinations are right, and the evidence of this potential is found in the smallest of gestures, like the uncertain resting of a large hand on a bony shoulder.”

— Jeffery Deaver

“All of us have our wires crossed and crisscrossed so many times it's impossible to untangle the mess. It really does seem like the entire human race might as well be conversing with hand gestures and grunts, for all the success we're having.”

— Jody Gehrman

“Demetrious was studying Law on the Open University and was, in all ways, a ray of sunshine into her life: warm and glorious, achingly temporary. He lived just off the high street with his boyfriend Rob, who worked in the City, doing something neither Demi nor Sukie pretended to understand.
"All the cute guys are gay," Sukie had laughed, that first day, holding her coffee mug high to her face to hide her genuine disappointment. Demi had just tilted his head and looked at her playfully, an expression she would get to know well.
"I'm not gay," he had clarified, matter-of-factly.
"Living with a boyfriend called Rob doesn't sound very straight!" Sukie had pointed out.
"Labels!" Demi had scorned, with one of his characteristic and very Greek hand gestures. "I fall in love with the person, not the gender.”

— Erin Lawless

“Here the first of the things that happened, happened. The first of the things important enough to notice and to remember afterward, among a great many trifling but kindred ones that were not. Some so slight they were not more than gloating, zestful glints of eye or curt hurtful gestures. (Once he accidentally poured a spurt of scalding tea on the back of a waitress' wrist, by not waiting long enough for the waitress to withdraw her hand in setting the cup down, and by turning his head momentarily the other way. The waitress yelped, and he apologized, but he showed his teeth as he did so, and you don't show your teeth in remorse).”

— Cornell Woolrich

“Italians had a "national peculiarity" to use distinctive hand gestures and body language when they spoke: a resource that was, he believed, obvious to an Italian like Leonardo when he came to paint The Last Supper.”

— Ross King

“Undoubtedly Italians use hand gestures and body language more creatively and prolifically than other European cultures.”

— Ross King

“The hand gestures of Italians are not, apparently, as clear-cut as Goethe believed. De Jorio discovered that knowing the purpose of someone's mind”

— Ross King

“Through hand gestures was no easy business. A single gesture could have many different significations. Even the mano infica turned out to have three different interpretations: it could mean the subject was warding off evil, or dishing out an insult, or making a kind of offensive or impertinent invitation.”

— Ross King

“In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don't want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf.
On the other hand, they demand that the president 'take control.' They demand that he hold press conferences, show leadership, announce that the buck stops here and do something. They want him to emote and perform the proper theatrical gestures so they can see their emotions enacted on the public stage.
They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn't control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn't make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn't want cuts, wants change and doesn't want change.”

— David Brooks

“Q: Why don't boys talk?
A: Boys do talk! You watch a group of them from a distance you will see that their lips are moving. They are probably making hand gestures as well. But what are they talking about?
I do my hare of talking with my guy friends, but I have no idea what we talk bout. guys have absolutely no short-term memory for conversations. This is why a girl can have a long, heart-to-heart talk with her sweetie, and the next day she makes some reference to what they talked about, and he looks at her with utter incomprehension and says, "Huh?"
The reason for this forgetfulness is that guys almost never anything in conversation that is worth remembering.”

— Pete Hautman

“We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.”

— Maggie O'Farrell

“Corporate types love to pretend their life is exciting. The whispers, fist-pumping and animated hand gestures are all designed to lift our job description from what it really is - that of an overpaid clerk”

— Chetan Bhagat

“Sebastian simply shrugged once more, placed his hand over his mouth in an exaggerated motion, and then bowed, gesturing to Robert. Robert translated this as 'I'm deeply sorry, but having promised my cousin that I wouldn't say a word, I must now embarrass him as best as I can with gestures.”

— Courtney Milan

“Driest displayed the intricate hand and facial combinations of the silent drow code, and he briefly entertained the notion of teaching the language to Belwar. The deep gnome promptly burst into loud and rolling laughter. His dark eyes looked incredulously at Drizzt, and he led the drow's gaze down to the ends of his arms. With a hammer and a pickaxe for hands, the svirfneblin could hardly muster enough gestures to make the effort worthwhile.”

— R.A. Salvatore

“Yo, yo, yo, check it out, said PJ, with enough hand gestures that any deaf person watching would have thought he had ASL Tourette's syndrome”

— Christopher Moore

“One Monday, just for sport, Charlie grabbed an eggplant that a spectacularly wizened granny was going for, but instead of twisting it out of his hand with some mystic kung fu move as he expected, she looked him in the eye and shook her head - just a jog, barely perceptible really - it might have been a tic, but it was the most eloquent of gestures. Charlie read it as saying: O White Devil, you do not want to purloin that purple fruit, for I have four thousand years of ancestors and civilization on you; my grandparents built the railroads and dug the silver mines, and my parents survived the earthquake, the fire, and a society that outlawed even being Chinese; I am mother to a dozen, grandmother to a hundred, and great-grandmother to a legion; I have birthed babies and washed the dead; I am history and suffering and wisdom; I am a Buddha and a dragon; so get your fucking hand off my eggplant before you lose it.”

— Christopher Moore

“He unsnapped her jeans and said, "I want you just like this." Then he kissed her.
There was nothing romantic about Diaz, no murmured sweet things, no gallant gestures, just this kiss that went on and on, deep and voracious. She'd never been kissed like this before, with an intensity that stripped everything down to the simplest components: male, female. He held her with his hand burrowed into her hair, her skull gripped in his palm, her head tilted back while he fed from her mouth. That was what it felt like, a taking. And yet he gave, too. He gave pleasure. She burned with it, the flames fueled by nothing more than his mouth and tongue.”

— Linda Howard

“In the hours that followed, I learned that Ademic hand gestures did not actually represent facial expressions. It was nothing so simple as that. For example a smile can mean you're amused, happy, grateful, or satisfied. You can smile to comfort someone. You can smile because you're content or because you're in love. A grimace or a grin look similar to a smile, but they mean entirely different things.
Imagine trying to teach someone how to smile. Imagine trying to describe what different smiles mean and when, precisely, to use them in conversation. It's harder than learning to walk.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

“I see Dr. Johnston at the end of the hall, walking toward us. He stops talking to the other doctors and gestures for me to wait. He holds up his hand: Stop. His face is eager yet unsmiling. I look in the other direction then back at him. His steps quicken, and I squint, for some reason pretending I don't recognize him. And I think: What if I'm wrong? What if Joanie doesn't make it out of this?
"Scottie," I say. "This way."
I walk in the other direction, away from Dr. Johnston, and she turns and follows me.
"Walk quickly," I tell her.
"Why?"
"It's a game. Let's race. Walk fast. Run."She takes off, her backpack jiggling on her back, and I follow her, walking quickly then breaking into a slow jog, and because Dr. Johnston is my friend's dad and was a friend of my father's, I feel like I'm fourteen again, running from the patriarchs.”

— Kaui Hart Hemmings

“Her mum is leaning against the wall, arms crossed, when Summer exits. "Gage left from here a few minutes ago," she says, tone neutral. "His hair was ruffled." She gestures with her hand above her head.
The haze Gage left Summer in vanishes. She frowns.
Her mum sighs and steps forward. Smooths her daughter's hair. "If he hurts you," she says in a mild tone, "I'll kill him.”

— Laura Kreitzer

“The closer they come to transcending technique and the memorization of lines
the closer to really beginning to act, in short
the more Chinese they begin to seem. Happy now approaches Miss Forsythe to pick her up in the restaurant with a wonderful formality, his back straight, head high, his hand-gestures even more precise and formal, but with a comic undertone that ironically comes closer to conveying the original American idea of the scene than when he was trying to be physically sloppy and "relaxed"
that is, imitating an American. I think that by some unplanned magic we may end up creating something not quite American or Chinese but a pure style springing from the heart of the play itself
the play as a nonnational event, that is, a human circumstance.”

— Arthur Miller

“How do our lives ravel out
into the no-wind, no-sound,
the weary gestures wearily recapitulant:
echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string:
in sunset we fall into furious attitudes,
dead gestures of dolls.”

— William Faulkner

“I opened my mouth, but I just couldn't find the words to express the mishmash of frustration and plain old mad I had spinning through my head. I moved my lips. I narrowed my eyes. I made angry hand gestures. But no words came out. I started to pace, gnawing my fingernails to the quick. Fortunately, they grew back almost instantly, which meant I had an endless supply.
Andrea stopped me in my tracks by grabbing my shoulders. OK, sweetheart, I'm all for nonverbal forms of communication, but you're starting to look like an extremely pissed-off mime. Use your words.”

— Molly Harper

“She did the "we have mysterious hand gestures that make us giggle" thing.”

— Elizabeth Scott

“In a movie, it's often important to have aliens whose gestures and facial expressions can be 'read' by humans. And in the days before sophisticated computer animation, most extraterrestrial bit players were guys in rubber suits. Such practical considerations forced Hollywood's hand when it came to aliens - they look like us for good reasons.”

— Seth Shostak

“Sometimes in someone's gestures you can notice how a parent is somehow inhabiting that person without there being any awareness of that. Sometimes you can look at your hand and see your father.”

— Sam Shepard

“The poet Gary Snyder's finely unpoetic image of composting is useful here. Stuff goes into the writer, a whole lot of stuff, not notes in a notebook but everything seen and heard and felt all day every day, a lot of garbage, leftovers, dead leaves, eyes of potatoes, artichoke stems, forests, streets, rooms in slums, mountain ranges, voices, screams, dreams, whispers, smells, blows, eyes, gaits, gestures, the touch of a hand, a whistle in the night, the slant of light on the wall of a child's room, a fin in a waste of waters. All this stuff goes down into the novelist's personal compost bin, where it combines, recombines, changes; gets dark, mulchy, fertile, turns into ground. A seed falls into it, the ground nourishes the seed with the richness that went into it, and something grows. But what grows isn't an artichoke stem and a potato eye and a gesture. It's a new thing, a new whole. It's made up.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“We'll always need energy. We need to communicate, too, but we're not stuck with hand gestures and smoke signals. There are better ways to power our future than by digging fossil fuel from the ground and setting it on fire.”

— Frances Beinecke

“I passed a large dark room where a wall-mounted flat-screen with sound muted showed an overweight rapper performing rap hand gestures, which are supposed to project masculine cool but in fact look like a pointlessly violent version of deaf sign language.”

— Glen Duncan

“With hand gestures, you can fill in a lot of gaps, and the words thing and stuff and -ness also help: patientness instead of patience, fastness instead of speed, honestness instead of honesty. With these choices, many words can be indicated, and pointing or gesticulating usually works.”

— Aimee Bender

“Did love really require grand gestures? Wasn't true love to be found in the little things, like holding one's hand or sitting comfortably around a gentle fire?”

— Maya Rodale

“Louis-Cesare and Ray were in trouble.
I could tell because I could see them, not clearly, but in fits and starts, little glimmers like a couple of ghosts, if ghosts made "oh shit" faces on the one hand agitated French gestures on the other. And that sort of shit wasn't going to go unnoticed for long.
Aaaaand it didn't.”

— Karen Chance

“Alec drew his hand back with a low whistle. "The Inquisitor meant business."
"Of course she did. I'm a dangerous criminal. Or hadn't you heard?" Jace heard the acid in his own tone, saw Alec flinch, and was meanly, momentarily, glad.
"She didn't call you a criminal, exactly ... "
"No, I'm just a very naughty boy. I do all sorts of bad things. I kick kittens. I make rude gestures at nun”

— Cassandra Clare

“All she had to do was make the simplest of gestures - open her hands and let go her hold. She lifted one hand and moved the fingers of it; they responded, in surprise and obedience, and this obedience of a thousand little unsuspected muscles was in itself a miracle. Why ask for more?”

— Simone De Beauvoir

“I, on the other hand, am walking through a larch wood and every step I take is history. I think 'I love you, Adriana' and that is history, will have great consequences. I'll behave tomorrow in battle like a man who has thought tonight 'I love you, Adriana.' Perhaps I may not accomplish great deeds but history is made up of little anonymous gestures; I may die tomorrow even before that German, but everything I do before dying and my death too will be little parts of history, and all the thoughts I'm having now will influence my history tomorrow, tomorrow's history of the human race.”

— Italo Calvino

“Why good news involved the man being pounded, Ian had never understood, but he knew that the gestures made Mac, Cam and Hart happy. Ian stood quietly and took their hand claps, arms around his shoulders, liking that he was part of them, brothers who had never deserted him.”

— Jennifer Ashley

“Day after day, Mersault let himself sink into his life as if he were sliding into water. And just as the swimmer advances by the complicity of his arms and the water which bears him up, helps him on, it was enough to make a few essential gestures - to rest one hand on a tree trunk, to take a run on the beach - in order to keep himself intact and conscious.”

— Albert Camus

“His little gestures of affection, his hand in the small of her aching back, her head brushing his shoulder. When she was with child, she used to cling to him for comfort, and he was always tender with her,”

— Philippa Gregory

“The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.”

— Jane Hirshfield

“Conan Doyle is amazing in the way he has Watson describe Sherlock's posture, mood swings, his hand gestures, and so forth in the novels.”

— Benedict Cumberbatch

“Affective gestures pointing to things near either in time or space should be made with the hand not very far from the body of the person pointing; and if these things are distant, the hand of the painter should be more extended and the face turned toward the person to whom he is addressing the demonstration.”

— Leonardo Da Vinci

“The leaves are falling, falling as from way off, as though far gardens withered in the skies; they are falling with denying gestures. And in the nights the heavy earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness. We all are falling. This hand falls. And look at others: it is in them all. And yet there is one who holds this falling endlessly gently in his hands.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is believed by experienced doctors that the heat which oozes out of the hand, on being applied to the sick, is highly salutary. It has often appeared, while I have been soothing my patients, as if there was a singular property in my hands to pull and draw away from the affected parts aches and diverse impurities, by laying my hand upon the place, and extending my fingers toward it. Thus it is known to some of the learned that health may be implanted in the sick by certain gestures, and by contact, as some diseases may be communicated from one to another.”

— Hippocrates