Straws Quotes - Page 5

People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws.

Charles Bukowski

Believe, Wind, People

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Smoking I find the most ridiculous of all the varieties of human behavior and practically the only one that is entirely against nature. Can you imagine a cow or any animal taking a mouthful of smoldering straw then breathing in the smoke and blowing it out through its nostrils?

Ian Fleming

Animal, Breathing, Smoking

Ian Fleming (1992). “Goldfinger”, Chivers North Amer

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And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.

Eduardo Galeano

Soccer, Football, Kissing

Eduardo Galeano (2013). “Soccer in Sun and Shadow”, p.5, Nation Books

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I hardly think a girl is much of a threat. I presume you searched her for weapons? But if she attempts to suffocate me with her straw mattress, I promise to call out for help.

Mary Hoffman

Girl, Thinking, Promise

Mary Hoffman (2010). “Stravaganza: City of Masks”, p.217, Bloomsbury Publishing

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He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.

Nicole Krauss

Loneliness, Understanding, Solitude

Nicole Krauss (2003). “Man Walks Into a Room”, p.156, Anchor

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Friend of fatherless! Fountain of happiness! Lord of the swill-bucket! Oh, how my soul is on Fire when I gaze at thy Calm and commanding eye. Like the sun in the sky, Comrade Napoleon! Thou are the giver of All thy creatures love, Full belly twice a day, clean straw to roll upon; Every beast great or small, Sleeps at peace in his stall, Thou watchest over all, Comrade Napoleon! Had I a sucking-pig, Ere he had grown as big Even as a pint bottle or a a rolling-pin He should have learned to be Faithful and true to thee, Yes, his first squeak should be Comrade Napoleon!

George Orwell

Sleep, Eye, Fire

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In the high school classroom you are a drill sergent, a rabbi, a shoulder to cry on, a disciplinarian, a singer, a low-level scholar, a clerk, a referee, a clown, a counselor, a dress-code enforcer, a conductor, an apologist, a philosopher, a collaborator, a tap dancer, a politician, a therapist, a fool, a traffic cop, a priest, a mother-father-brother-sister-uncle-aunt, a bookeeper, a critic, a psychologist, the last straw.

Frank McCourt

Mother, Brother, Uncles

Frank McCourt (2005). “Teacher Man: A Memoir”, p.19, Simon and Schuster

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If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.

L. Frank Baum

Beautiful, Kansas, People

L. Frank Baum, W. W. Denslow, Ned Halley (2009). “The Wizard of Oz”, p.35, Collector's Library

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Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Lying, Believe, Maturity

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Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us --- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.

Carl Sagan

Atheist, Ocean, Dedication

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Panic. You open your mouth. Open it so wide your jaws creak. You order your lungs to draw air, NOW, you need air, need it NOW. But your airways ignore you. They collapse, tighten, squeeze, and suddenly you're breaithing through a drinking straw. Your mouth closes and your lips purse and all you can manage is a croak. Your hands wriggle and shake. Somewhere a dam has cracked open and a flood of cold sweat spills, drenches your body. You want to scream. You would if you could. Cut you have to breathe to scream. Panic.

Khaled Hosseini

Drinking, Cutting, Air

Khaled Hosseini (2010). “The Complete Khaled Hosseini: Digital box set”, p.58, A&C Black

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There once was a miller with a daughter as lovely as a grape. He told the king that she could spin gold out of common straw. The king summoned the girl and locked her in a room full of straw and told her to spin it into gold or she would die like a criminal. Poor grape with no one to pick. Luscious and round and sleek. Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn. (Rumpelstiltskin)

Anne Sexton

Girl, Daughter, Kings

Anne Sexton (2001). “Transformations”, p.18, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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We have one crystal clear reason apart from the blessed happiness of this way of life. It is this: prayer is the core of our day. Take prayer out, and the day would collapse, would be pithless, a straw blown in the wind. But how can you pray--really pray, I mean--with one against who you have a grudge or whom you have been discussing critically with another? Try it. You will find it cannot be done.

Amy Carmichael

Christian, Prayer, Blessed

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Who would guess," he teased, "that I'd ever see you on a rooftop with straw in your hair?" Kit giggled. "Are you saying I've turned into a crow?" "Not exactly." His eyes were intensely blue with merriment. "I can still see the green feathers if I look hard enough. But they've done their best to make you into a sparrow, haven't they?

Elizabeth George Speare

Eye, Hair, Blue

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He could wear hats. He could wear an assortment of hats of different shapes and styles. Boater hats, cowboy hats, bowler hats. The list went on. Pork-pie hats, bucket hats, trillbies and panamas. Top hats, straw hats, trapper hats. Wide brim narrow brim, stingy brim. He could wear a fez. Fezzes were cool. Hadn't someone once said that fezzes were cool? He was pretty aur ether had. And they were. They were cool.

Derek Landy

Cowboy, Pie, Style

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…You see, my dear friend, I am made up of contradictions, and I have reached a very mature age without resting upon anything positive, without having calmed my restless spirit either by religion or philosophy. Undoubtedly I should have gone mad but for music. Music is indeed the most beautiful of all Heaven's gifts to humanity wandering in the darkness. Alone it calms, enlightens, and stills our souls. It is not the straw to which the drowning man clings; but a true friend, refuge, and comforter, for whose sake life is worth living

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Beautiful, True Friend, Philosophy

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... until Miri could not help it any longer and she laughed out loud. The sound broke the game. Peder looked at her. He reached out, and she thought he meant to grab her straw or perhaps yank her hair as he used to when they were little. But her put his hand behind her head and, leaning forward, pulled her face to his. He kissed her. One long, slow kiss.

Shannon Hale

Kissing, Hair, Hands

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Take a straw and throw it up into the air, you may see by that which way the wind is.

John Selden

Air, Wind, May

John Selden, Richard Milward (1821). “Seldeniana: with a biographical preface”, p.80

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A king is a mortal god on earth, unto whom the living God hath lent his own name as a great honour; but withal told him, he should die like a man, lest he should be proud, and flatter himself that God hath with his name imparted unto him his nature also. JOHN LOCKE, "Of a King", The Conduct of the Understanding: Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political A king may be a tool, a thing of straw; but if he serves to frighten our enemies, and secure our property, it is well enough: a scarecrow is a thing of straw, but it protects the corn.

Alexander Pope

Kings, Men, Names

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At Dresden on the Elbe, that handsome city,
Where straw hats, verses, and cigars are made,
They've built (it well may make us feel afraid,)
A music club and music warehouse pretty.

Heinrich Heine

Cities, Clubs, May

Heinrich Heine (1866). “The Poems of Heine: Complete”, p.21

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If he [Thomas Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. ... [J]ust a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.

Nikola Tesla

Science, Ust, Littles

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The scene fascinated me: a round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle.

Alfred Stieglitz

Art, Cutting, Men

Alfred Stieglitz, J. Paul Getty Museum (1995). “Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum”, p.20, Getty Publications

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Novembers days are thirty: Novembers earth is dirty, Those thirty days, from first to last; And the prettiest things on ground are the paths.... Few care for the mixture of earth and water, Twig, leaf, flint, thorn, Straw, feather, all that men scorn, Pounded up and sodden by flood, Condemned as mud.

Edward Thomas

Nature, Dirty, Men

Edward Thomas (2012). “Poems of Edward Thomas”, p.28, Other Press, LLC

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When a man's in love, he at once makes a pedestal of the Ten Commandments and stands on the top of them with his arms akimbo. When a woman's in love she doesn't care two straws for Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not.

W. Somerset Maugham

Men, Two, Pedestal

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The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

Remy de Gourmont

Tangled, Perception, Mind

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