Shuttlecock Quotes

• It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Fall, Writing

  Samuel Johnson (1966). “Johnsonian miscellanies”, Constable

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• A tender young cork, however, would have had no more chance against a pair of corkscrews, or a tender young tooth against a pair of dentists, or a little shuttlecock against two battledores, than I had against Uriah and Mrs. Heep. They did just what they liked with me; and wormed things out of me that I had no desire to tell, with a certainty I blush to think of.

  Charles Dickens

  Character, Thinking, Two

  Charles Dickens (2012). “Four Novels: Great Expectations, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Hard Times”, p.759, Graphic Arts Books

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• You can't kill America. We're more than a nation. We're a notion. We're an idea. The American Dream. You never heard of the Afghanistani Dream have you. Except by bearded hermetic recluses with a fetish for uneducated women dressed as giant shuttlecocks.

  Will Durst

  Dream, Ideas, America

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• I am sorry the infernal Divinities, who visit mankind with diseases, and are therefore at perpetual war with Doctors, should have prevented my seeing all you great Men at Soho to-day-Lord! what inventions, what wit, what rhetoric, metaphysical, mechanical and pyrotecnical, will be on the wing, bandy'd like a shuttlecock from one to another of your troop of philosophers! while poor I, I by myself I, imprizon'd in a post chaise, am joggled, and jostled, and bump'd, and bruised along the King's high road, to make war upon a pox or a fever!

  Erasmus Darwin

  Kings, Sorry, War

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• Battledore and shuttlecock's a wery good game, vhen you an't the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too exciting to be pleasant.

  Charles Dickens

  Games, Two, Lawyer

  Pickwick Papers ch. 20 (1837)

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• I'm substantially concerned about the policy directions of the space agency. We have a situation in the U.S. where the White House and Congress are at odds over what the future direction should be. They're sort of playing a game and NASA is the shuttlecock that they're hitting back and forth.

  Neil Armstrong

  Games, White, Space

  "Neil Armstrong's last interview: rare glimpse of man and moon mission" by Paul Gallagher, www.theguardian.com. August 25, 2012.

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