Skimming Quotes

• General jackdaw culture, very little more than a collection of charming miscomprehensions, untargeted enthusiasms, and a general habit of skimming.

  William Bolitho

  Society, Culture, Littles

  53 Copy quote

• He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

  Arthur Balfour

  Funny, Art, Book

  9 Copy quote

• You can't catch the big fish by skimming the surface.

  Andy Gilbert

  Courage, Big Fish, Bigs

  45 Copy quote

• It is not a question of skimming the surface of the art, it must be probed to its depths, for to seize upon superficial things only is to degenerate into mediocrity and obscurity.

  Jean-Georges Noverre

  Art, Superficial Things, Ballet

  9 Copy quote

• Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.

  Anne Fadiman

  Reading, Mean, Cutting

  Anne Fadiman (2011). “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader”, p.137, Macmillan

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• What happiness this is: to fly, skimming over the earth just as we do in our dreams! Life has become a dream. Can this be the meaning of paradise?

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  Dream, Earth, Paradise

  Nikos Kazantzakis, Peter Bien (1988). “The Last Temptation of Christ”, p.458, Simon and Schuster

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• Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.

  Janet Fitch

  Dream, Drinking, Echoes

  26 Copy quote

• I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.

  Tim O'Brien

  Moving, Dark, Years

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.233, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Suppose that insect wings developed primarily as thermoregulators and then were used for skimming and finally flying, evolving along the way. What would they be "for"? Or what is the skeleton "for"? For keeping one upright, protecting organs, storing calcium, making blood cells...?

  Noam Chomsky

  Skeletons, Cells, Blood

  Source: libcom.org

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• Real isn't what they try to tell you. Time isn't. Grown-ups hammer down all these markers, bells, schedules, coffee-breaks, to stake down time so you'll start believing it's something small and mean, something that scrapes flake after flake off of everything you love till there's nothing left; to stake you down so you don't lift off and fly away, somersaulting through whirlpools of months, skimming through eddies of glittering seconds, pouring handfuls of hours over your upturned face.

  Tana French

  Real, Coffee, Believe

  Tana French (2014). “The Secret Place: Dublin Murder Squad: 5”, p.186, Hachette UK

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• in my skimmings over fiction I cannot recall any writer so continuously implicated in his own work as George Moore.

  Susan Mitchell

  Fiction, Recalls

  4 Copy quote

• ... It was the idea of facing a future skimming the surface of life, winging my way in and out of other people's crises, confusions, and passages, engaging them enough to get the story, but never enough to be indelibly touched by what I had seen or heard.

  Anna Quindlen

  Ideas, People, Confusion

  Anna Quindlen (2003). “Object Lessons: One True Thing ; Black and Blue”

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• The best filmmakers, I think, have always had very narrow frameworks for their stories, and then they can go deeply, rather than skimming the surface.

  Paul Auster

  Thinking, Stories, Framework

  Paul Auster, James M. Hutchisson (2013). “Conversations with Paul Auster”, p.195, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Old age is
  a flight of small
  cheeping birds
  skimming
  bare trees
  above a snow glaze.

  William Carlos Williams

  Snow, Bird, Tree

  William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.152, New Directions Publishing

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• To Fred, those years seemed to pass like quickly skimming a book and then finding the ending wasn't what he expected. He wished he'd paid more attention to the story.

  Sarah Addison Allen

  Book, Years, Attention

  Sarah Addison Allen (2007). “Garden Spells”, p.197, Bantam

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• I read hard, or not at all; never skimming, never turning aside to merely inciting books; and Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards, have passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution.

  Frederick William Robertson

  Plato, Book, Reading

  8 Copy quote

• Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti

  Baseball, Home, Journey

  A. Bartlett Giamatti (1998). “A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti”, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

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• Old age is
  a flight of small
  cheeping birds
  skimming
  bare trees
  above a snow glaze.
  Gaining and failing
  they are buffeted
  by a dark wind -
  But what?
  On harsh weedstalks
  the flock has rested -
  the snow
  is covered
  with broken
  seed husks
  and the wind tempered
  with a shrill
  piping of plenty.

  William Carlos Williams

  Dark, Wind, Snow

  "To Awaken an Old Lady". The Dial, August 1920.

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• Lightly tripping o'er the land, Deftly skimming o'er the main, Scarce our fairy wings bedewing With the frothy mantling brine, Scarce our silver feet acquainting With the verdure-vested ground; Now like swallows o'er a river Gliding low with quivering pinion, Now aloft in ether sailing "Leisurely as summer cloud;" Rising now, anon descending, Swift and bright as shooting stars, Thus we travel glad and free.

  Hartley Coleridge

  Summer, Stars, Clouds

  Hartley Coleridge, Derwent Coleridge (1851). “Poems”, p.261

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• I just think the idea of moving away from the body and discovering sensuality by skimming the body, not tightening the body, seems rather new to me. Especially in this world where we're living right now, where the idea of giving freedom to women, especially in politics what's happening, it seemed so appealing to me, so that was the starting point.

  Prabal Gurung

  Moving, Thinking, Living Right

  Source: www.elle.com

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• Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them-with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances, which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Struggle, Heart, People

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.45, e-artnow

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• Many of our tribe went to the cliff each night to count the number killed during the day. They counted the dead otter and thought of the beads and other things that each pelt meant. But I never went to the cove and whenever I saw the hunters with their long spears skimming over the water, I was angry, for these animals were my friends. It was fun to see them playing or sunning themselves among the kelp. It more fun than the thought of beads to wear around my neck.

  Scott O'Dell

  Fun, Animal, Night

  Scott O'Dell (2016). “Island of the Blue Dolphins: The Complete Reader's Edition”, p.106, Univ of California Press

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• I just wanted to thank you' he says, his voice low. 'A group of scientists told you that my genes were damaged, that there was something wrong with me - they showed you the test results that proved it. And even I started to believe it.' He touches my face, his thumb skimming my cheekbone, and his eyes are on mine, intense and insistent. 'You never believed it,' he says 'Not for a second. You always insisted I was... I don't know, whole.

  Veronica Roth

  Believe, Eye, Voice

  11 Copy quote

• They went down the list of every known charge conceivable to man - rackeering, skimming, kickback, ticket scalping. fixing fights, preordaining fights, vitaiting officials, corrupting judges, all the way down to laundering money. Everything but the Lindbergh baby.

  Don King

  Baby, Fighting, Men

  4 Copy quote

• It was a morning of ground mist, yellow sunshine, and high rifts of blue, white-cloud-dappled sky. The leaves were still thick on the trees, but de-spangled gossamer threads hung on the bushes and the shrill little cries of unrest of the swallows skimming the green open park spaces of the park told of autumn and change.

  Flora Thompson

  Morning, Sunshine, Autumn

  9 Copy quote