Flapping Quotes

• That's why ears have cartilage, to keep them from flapping.

  Bill Cosby

  Ears

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• Jumping out a window five hundred feet above ground is not usually my idea of fun. Especially when I'm wearing bronze wings and flapping my arms like a duck.

  Rick Riordan

  Fun, Jumping, Wings

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• Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.

  E. L. Konigsburg

  Happiness, Happy, Littles

  E.L. Konigsburg (2015). “From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler”, p.102, Pushkin Press

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• Rules and Things Number 63: Never, Ever Say Something Bad About Someone You Don't Know--Especially When You're Around a Bunch of Strangers. You Never Can Tell Who Might Be Kin to That Person or Who Might Be a Lip-Flapping, Big-Mouth Spy.

  Christopher Paul Curtis

  Numbers, Spy, Mouths

  Christopher Paul Curtis, Holt Rinehart & Winston (2002). “Bud, not Buddy: with connections”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• Actresses can get outrageously precious about the way they look. That's not what life's about. If you starve yourself to the point where your brain cells shrivel, you will never do good work. And if you're overly conscious of your arms flapping in the wind, how can you look the other actor in the eye to respond to them?

  Cate Blanchett

  Eye, Cells, Wind

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• Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly. She cries out, "Emergency, emergency," and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing is has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has no been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families, too, to keep us quiet.

  Lydia Davis

  Running, Morning, Taken

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• If I saw something once that I can't explain, that doesn't make them real. And if a trick of the dark gave me a chill, that doesn't make them real. And if a madman says what's at the core of us all is a senseless, flapping quiver of black shade, that's just one more reason not to believe.

  Charlie Huston

  Real, Believe, Dark

  Charlie Huston (2009). “My Dead Body: A Novel”, p.45, Del Rey

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• We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Princess, Tunnels, Media

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.34, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Snapshots, moments, mere seconds: as fragile and beautiful and hopeless as a single butterfly, flapping on against a gathering wind.

  Lauren Oliver

  Beautiful, Butterfly, Wind

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• Fractal litigation, whereby the flapping of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world resulted in a massive compensation claim on the other.

  Steve Aylett

  Butterfly, Wings, World

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• A flapping tongue has killed more men than sudden storms ever did.

  Robert Jordan

  Men, Storm, Tongue

  Robert Jordan (2002). “The Dragon Reborn: Book Three of 'The Wheel of Time'”, p.232, Macmillan

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• Good fences make good neighbors.

  Robert Frost

  Alaska, Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder, Mind Your Own Business

  "MendingWall" l. 25 (1914)

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• We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.

  Angela Carter

  Humanity, Rags, Scarecrow

  Angela Carter (1984). “Nights at the circus”, Vintage

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• Flapping my arms I began to cluck, look at me, I'm the disco duck.

  Rick Dees

  Ducks, Dancing, Looks

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• It is a distortion, with something profoundly disloyal about it, to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing, watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces.

  Lewis Thomas

  Health, Pieces, Distortion

  Lewis Thomas (1972*). “Aspects of Biomedical Science Policy”, p.3, National Academies

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• Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Running, Flames, Sensual

  D. H. Lawrence (2016). “Lady chatterleys lover”, p.167, D. H. Lawrence

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• Her mind is a bird that's trapped inside her skull, flapping and thrashing, never breaking free.

  Lauren DeStefano

  Skulls, Bird, Mind

  Lauren DeStefano (2012). “Fever”, p.89, Simon and Schuster

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• A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.

  Billy Collins

  Wind, Midnight, Tails

  Billy Collins (2011). “Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems”, p.9, Random House

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• If that moment had been a real thing, it would've been a butterfly, flapping and fluttering toward the sun.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Real, Butterfly, Sun

  Maggie Stiefvater (2009). “Shiver”, p.179, Scholastic Inc.

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• I hold that in the flight of the soaring birds (the vultures, the eagles, and other birds which fly without flapping) ascension is produced by the skillful use of the force of the wind, and the steering, in any direction, is the result of skillful manoeuvres; so that by a moderate wind a man can, with an aeroplane, un- provided with any motor whatever, rise up into the air and direct himself at will, even against the wind itself.

  Louis Pierre Mouillard

  Men, Air, Eagles

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• From the time of Dante [Alighieri], when you have the Ptolemaic universe, you had God on the outside like a hypersphere, and then in the center you have the Earth, all the seven heavens and layers, and then you have the Mount of Purgatory and Hell right in the center, and here's Satan flapping his wings and he keeps making the lake of Cocytus ice so you can't get out. So, again, where Heaven and Hell are, who the hell knows that now?

  Paul Laffoley

  Ice, Wings, Lakes

  Source: www.paranoiamagazine.com

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• It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.

  Mark Twain

  Running, German Language, Brain

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.142, Courier Corporation

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• An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Artist, Self

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.466, Vintage

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• Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Monday, Autumn, Weekend

  "The Autumn of the Patriarch". Book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, www.nytimes.com. 1975.

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• Good fences make good neighbors, and these were apparently good enough that they had not felt the need for razor wire at the top. I crested the fence, threw myself into the yard beyond, fell, rolled to my feet, and ran with the expectation of being garroted by a taut clothesline. I heard panting, looked down, and saw a gold retriever running at my side, ears flapping. The dog glanced up at me tongue rolling, grinning, as though jazzed by the prospect of an unscheduled play session.

  Dean Koontz

  Running, Dog, Play

  Dean Koontz (2014). “The Odd Thomas Series 7-Book Bundle: Odd Thomas, Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours, Odd Apocalypse, Odd Interlude, Deeply Odd”, p.950, Bantam

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