Floundering Quotes

• This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

  Ted Hughes

  Eye, Night, Orange

  Ted Hughes (2009). “The Hawk in the Rain”, p.37, Faber & Faber

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• Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead.

  Matt Taibbi

  Successful, Evil, Stories

  "Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital". www.rollingstone.com. August 29, 2012.

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• Woman's inaptitude for reasoning has not prevented her from arriving at truth; nor has man's ability to reason prevented him from floundering in absurdity.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Men, Arriving, Reason

  Harry Persons Taber, Elbert Hubbard (1905). “The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest”

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• I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.

  H. G. Wells

  Sea, Imagination, Submarines

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• The day is committed to error and floundering; success and achievement are matters of long range.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Success, Errors, Long

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• America's founding fathers did not intend to take religion out of education. Many of the nation's greatest universities were founded by evangelists and religious leaders; but many of these have lost the founders concept and become secular institutions. Because of this attitude, secular education is stumbling and floundering.

  Billy Graham

  Religious, Attitude, Father

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• Floundering around, learning by doing but also by failing, is not only good but inevitable.

  Duncan Green

  Failing, Inevitable, Learning By Doing

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft.  Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering.  Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.

  Twyla Tharp

  Passion, Essence, Skills

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• It must be hard for humans, forever floundering through inconvenient geography. Humans are always lost. It's a basic characteristic. It explains a lot about them.

  Terry Pratchett

  Forever, Geography, Lost

  Terry Pratchett (2008). “Lords And Ladies: (Discworld Novel 14)”, p.349, Random House

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• We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity.

  Patti Smith

  Spiritual, Fall, Son

  Patti Smith (2010). “Just Kids”, p.245, A&C Black

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• I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent my years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home

  Khaled Hosseini

  Real, Home, Self

  Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.292, A&C Black

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• The music industry went through such a strange stretch in 1977, especially in this country, with the whole punk rock thing coming about. Punk was rebellious-and justified in that response-but it had very little to do with music, and so it created a highly-charged but frighteningly floundering atmosphere that I found very, very disheartening. Musical quality for me has always been an important part of rock'n'roll-and winning recognition for that has long been an uphill battle all the way. Punk seemed like rock'n'roll utterly without the music.

  Steve Winwood

  Country, Winning, Rocks

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• Though the Floundering Fathers didn't intend it, we now see that representative government quickly turns into the dictatorship of the proletariat. If you doubt this, I congratulate you on not having a television.

  Fred Reed

  Father, Government, Doubt

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• Really, one of us ought to have the courage to call the experiment off and shoulder the responsibility for the decision, but the majority reckons that that kind of courage would be a sign of cowardice, and the first step in a retreat. They think it would mean an undignified surrender for mankind as if there was any dignity in floundering and drowning in what we don't understand and never will.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Mean, Responsibility, Thinking

  "Solaris". Book by Stanisław Lem, translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox. Chapter 11: "The Thinkers", p. 158, 1970.

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• After graduation, I was floundering in L.A., doing stand-up comedy and working in a shoe store in the Valley.

  Kevin Spacey

  Shoes, Valleys, Comedy

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• Nobody wanted your dance, Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering Drowning life and your effort to save yourself, Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil, Looking for something to give.

  Ted Hughes

  Dark, Giving, Dancing

  Ted Hughes (2009). “Birthday Letters”, p.29, Faber & Faber

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• Ectoplasmic plane? What the devil is that? (Simone) It’s jargon from those of us who are corporeally challenged. It’s the great beyond where we bounce into each other like floundering atoms. It’s really kind of gross – which is why I hang out with you. But only because you’re less gross than they are. (Jesse)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Devil, Atoms, Jargon

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2008). “Dream Chaser”, p.83, Macmillan

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• Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments.

  Beatrice Warde

  Art, Humility, Self

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• And now I realize Lindsay's not fearless. She's terrified. She's terrified that people will find out she's faking, bullshitting her way through life, pretending to have everything together when really she's just floundering like the rest of us. Lindsay, who will bite at you if you even look in her direction the wrong way, like on of those tiny attack dogs that are always barking and snapping in the air before they're jerked backward on the chains that keep them in one place.

  Lauren Oliver

  Dog, Air, People

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• Golf is the Great Mystery. Like some capricous goddess, it bestows its favours with what would appear an almost fat-headed lack of method and discrimination. On every side we see big two-fisted he-men floundering round in three figures, stopping every few minutes to let through little shrimps with knock-knees and hollow cheeks, who are tearing up snappy seventy-fours.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Golf, Men, Two

  P. G. Wodehouse (1999). “Fore!: The Best of Wodehouse on Golf”, p.189, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It was a bird. A bird struggling through stickiness: a bird coated in paint, floundering in its nest, splashing color everywhere. Red. Red. Red. Dozens of them: black feathers coated thickly with crimson-colored paint, fluttering among the branches. Red means run.

  Lauren Oliver

  Running, Struggle, Mean

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