Bolts Quotes - Page 5

• What are fears but voices airy?
  Whispering harm where harm is not.
  And deluding the unwary
  Till the fatal bolt is shot!

  William Wordsworth

  Fear, Voice, Whispering

  William Wordsworth (1827). “The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth”, p.114

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• I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears; and caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts; and buckled with a smile Mausers and Colts; and rusted every bayonet with His tears.

  Wilfred Owen

  Jesus, Gun, Tears

  Wilfred Owen (1965). “The Collected poems of Wilfred Owen”, p.84, New Directions Publishing

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• Significant inventions are not mere accidents. The erroneous view [that they are] is widely held, and it is one that the scientific and technical community, unfortunately, has done little to dispel. Happenstance usually plays a part, to be sure, but there is much more to invention than the popular notion of a bolt out of the blue. Knowledge in depth and in breadth are virtual prerequisites. Unless the mind is thoroughly charge beforehand, the proverbial spark of genius, if it should manifest itself, probably will find nothing to ignite.

  Paul Flory

  Blue, Views, Play

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• All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.

  Wally Lamb

  Knives, World, Shade

  Wally Lamb (2012). “She's Come Undone”, p.162, Simon and Schuster

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• A fool bolts pleasure, then complains of moral indigestion.

  Minna Antrim

  Complaining, Fool, Moral

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• He has the attention span of a lightning bolt.

  Robert Redford

  Sarcastic, Personality, Lightning

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• Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

  Chuck Close

  Work, Inspiration, Ideas

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• It's only the last turn of a bolt that tightens it - the rest is just movement.

  Shigeo Shingo

  Movement, Lasts, Turns

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• Justin Halpern tosses lightning bolts of laughter out of his pocket like he is shooting dice in a back alley. In one sweep of a paragraph, he ranges from hysterical to disgusting to touching--and does it all seamlessly. Sh*t My Dad Says is a really, really funny book.

  Laurie Notaro

  Dad, Laughter, Book

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• Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.

  James Russell Lowell

  Death, Angel, Dying

  James Russell Lowell (1861). “Poetical Works”, p.202

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• Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God's name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall. This is the way of life, and God alone knows how it works.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Wall, Blue, Doors

  FaceBook post by Barbara Brown Taylor from Jul 02, 2013

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• We look at the ancient Greeks with their gods on a mountain top throwing lightning bolts and say, 'Those ancient Greeks. They were so silly. So primitive and naive. Not like our religions. We have burning bushes talking to people and guys walking on water. We're ...sophisticated.'

  Paul Provenza

  Silly, Talking, People

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• You look at Vladimir Radmanovic, this guy is cut from stone. As if Michelangelo was reading and a lightening bolt flashed before him.

  Bill Walton

  Reading, Cutting, Guy

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• To crank myself up I stood on a jack and ran myself up. I tightened myself like a bolt. I inserted myself in a vise-clamp and wound the handle till the pressure built. I drank coffee in titrated doses. It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgment of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.

  Annie Dillard

  Coffee, Useless, Tiny

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• My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy.

  William Carlos Williams

  Suicidal, Blue, Joy

  "The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams" by William Carlos Williams, W. W. Norton & Co., 1951.

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• There's a mystery there, a clue, a nut, a bolt, and if I put it together, I find me.

  Maurice Sendak

  Nuts, Together, Mystery

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• A bolt of warmth, fierce with joy and pride and gratitude, flashed through me like sudden lightning. I don't care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching-they are your family. And they were my heroes.

  Jim Butcher

  Gratitude, Courage, Hero

  Jim Butcher (2007). “Proven Guilty: A Novel Of the Dresden Files”, p.304, Penguin

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• It is the greatest and the tallest of trees that the gods bring low with bolts and thunder. For the gods love to thwart whatever is greater than the rest. They do not suffer pride in anyone but themselves.

  Herodotus

  Pride, Tree, Suffering

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• I don't believe in inspiration that arrives like a bolt from the blue ... It seems to me that the more motivated I am by what I film, the more objectively I film.

  Agnes Varda

  Inspirational, Believe, Blue

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• Oh! don't you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt, Sweet Alice, whose hair was so brown, Who wept with delight when you gave her a smile, And trembled with fear at your frown?

  Thomas Dunn English

  Sweet, Fear, Hair

  'Ben Bolt'

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• That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle-behold, the Running Man.

  Christopher McDougall

  Running, Art, Real

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• And what more should I say since it expels the whole host of the virtues from the chamber of the human heart and introduces every barbarous vice as if the bolts of the doors were pulled out.

  Peter Damian

  Christian, Heart, Doors

  Peter Damian (2010). “Book of Gomorrah: An Eleventh-Century Treatise against Clerical Homosexual Practices”, p.64, Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

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• If my father's business hadn't gone broke, I'd be exporting nuts, bolts and sugar machinery right now. What an awful thought!

  Cesar Romero

  Father, Nuts, Gone

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• Sometimes, when I was really loaded, I'd sit on the floor and sort out every nut and bolt in the house. It was just sheer insanity. And often there'd be speed in the cut, so I was a speed freak, too.

  George Carlin

  Cutting, Nuts, Insanity

  Source: reprints.longform.org

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• Martin Luther King's 1963 'I have a dream' speech was a thrilling milestone in the civil rights movement, so enduring that we tend to attribute its searing power to a kind of magic. But Gary Younge's meditative retrospection on its significance reminds us of all the micro-moments of transformation behind the scenes--the thought and preparation, vision and revision--whose currency fed that magnificent lightning bolt in history.

  Patricia J. Williams

  Dream, Kings, Rights

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