Flailing Quotes

• We all know what flopping is when we see it. The stuff that you see is where guys aren't really getting hit at all and are just flailing around like a fish out of water.

  Kobe Bryant

  Water, Guy, Stuff

  "Kobe Bryant Challenges The Manhood Of NBA Floppers" by Lorenzo Arguello, www.businessinsider.com. May 16, 2012.

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• I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.

  Jennifer Egan

  Block, Writing, Thinking

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• She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Struggle, Might, Desperate

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When you take other people's opinions, you end up flailing and you have no center.

  Gary Allan

  People, Opinion, Ends

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• I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn’t have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. It seems writer’s block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen.

  Jennifer Egan

  Block, Writing, Thinking

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• Flailing and thrashing, Buttercup wept and tossed and paced and wept some more, and there have been three great cases of jealousy since David of Galilee was first afflicted with the emotion when he could no longer stand the fact that his neighbor Saul's cactus outshone his own. (Originally, jealousy pertained solely to plants, other people's cactus or ginkgoes, or, later, when there was grass, grass, which is why, even to this day, we say that someone is green with jealousy.) Buttercup's case rated a close fourth on the all-time list. It was a very long and very green night.

  William Goldman

  Night, Long, People

  William Goldman (2013). “The Princess Bride: An Illustrated Edition of S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure”, p.53, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Scientists will eventually stop flailing around with solar power and focus their efforts on harnessing the only truly unlimited source of energy on the planet: stupidity. I predict that in the future, scientists will learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel.

  Scott Adams

  Focus, Effort, Stupidity

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• Our stock in trade is raw, flailing sex.

  Al Goldstein

  Sex, Trade

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• I'd consider myself a flailing comedy writer.

  Benjamin Walker

  Comedy

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• I fear that our true motivation is about oil and our own flailing economy; about the failure to destroy Al Qaeda and about revenge.

  Dave Matthews

  Motivational, Revenge, Oil

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• Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.

  Eric Hoffer

  Balance, Arms, Action

  Eric Hoffer (1996). “The Passionate State of Mind”

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• To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.

  Eric Hoffer

  Justice, Diversity, Soul

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• We are dying of preconceptions, outworn rules, decaying flags, venomous religions, and sentimentalities. We need a new world. We've wrenched up all the old roots. The old men have no roots. They don't know it. They just go on talking and flailing away and falling down on the young with their tons of dead weight and their power. For the power is still there, in their life-in-death. But the roots are dead, and the land is poisoned for miles around them.

  Josephine Winslow Johnson

  Fall, Power, Men

  Josephine Winslow Johnson (1996). “The Inland Island”, Writer's Digest Books

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• I'm not flailing now, as my muscles are rigid with the tension of holding myself together.

  Suzanne Collins

  Together, Muscles, Tension

  Suzanne Collins (2011). “The Hunger Games Trilogy”, p.1183, Scholastic Inc.

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• If we Americans are to learn from our mistakes, from the flailing, ineffective way we, as a nation, conducted the war on terror after the attacks of 9/11, and from the way we have failed to make our case to the great moderate mass of peace-loving people at the heart of the Muslim world, we need to listen to Greg Mortenson. I did, and it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

  David Oliver Relin

  War, Mistake, Heart

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• There's a lot of Hollywood bullshit about flying. I mean, look at the movies about test pilots or fighter pilots who face imminent death. The controls are jammed or something really important has fallen off the plane, and these guys are talking like magpies; their lives are flashing past their eyes, and they're flailing around in the cockpit. It just doesn't happen. You don't have time to talk. You're too damn busy trying to get out of the problem you're in to talk or ricochet around the cockpit. Or think about what happened the night after your senior prom.

  Robin Olds

  Senior, Eye, Mean

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• Perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark; that our data base is too sparse, too slippery, for it to be able to mold our theories. Rather the theories are more statements about us and ideology than about the past. Paleontology reveals more about how humans view themselves than it does about how humans came about, but that is heresy.

  David Pilbeam

  Dark, Past, Data

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• The funeral is a quiet one, despite the number of mourners present. There are no sobs or flailing handkerchiefs. There is a smattering of color amongst the sea of traditional black. Even the light rain cannot push it down into the realms of despair. It rests instead in a space of thoughtful melancholy.

  Erin Morgenstern

  Rain, Thoughtful, Light

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• I fell into that kiss like Alice into Wonderland, headfirst and flailing, heart pounding the whole time. The world spun around me and still I fell, and I only crashed down to earth again when someone called my name.

  Rachel Vincent

  Heart, Kissing, Names

  Rachel Vincent (2011). “If I Die”, p.206, Harlequin

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• I jump out of the boat [in The Lost World], and I'm trying to swim to the kid, and my boots fill with water, and I start to drown, and the director has no idea why I'm flailing around. He's, "Come on, come on!" And I managed to rescue myself. I'm wet and sitting on the banks of the river, and John walks over to me and says, "Are you all right, dear boy?" "Yeah, I'm all right."

  Eric McCormack

  Kids, Boys, Ideas

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• When I first started making music, I didn't really know what I was doing. I just wanted to write songs. I didn't have a concept. I didn't think it through. I was just flailing around doing what comes naturally. It took me a really long time to step back and deal with what I was doing with any kind of perspective or self-awareness.

  Juliana Hatfield

  Song, Writing, Thinking

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• Capitalism now seems more likely a swamp, a bog, a quicksand in which humanity is presently flailing about, unable to extricate itself, perhaps doomed to perish within a few generations from the long term effects of the technology which seemed to Marx its greatest gift to humanity.

  Allen W. Wood

  Technology, Long, Humanity

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• With Complicated Grief I can say that there was a certain simplification in the process. Getting older means less wasted effort, things are clearer earlier. Being young meant flailing around a lot, especially as I was trying to invent new shapes without a ton of models.

  Laura Mullen

  Grief, Mean, Effort

  Source: therumpus.net

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• What would a Martian visitor think to see a human being laugh? It must look truly horrible: the sight of furious gestures, flailing limbs, and thorax heaving in frenzied contortions.

  Marvin Minsky

  Thinking, Sight, Laughing

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• Action is basically a reaction against loss of balance - a flailing of the arms to to regain one's balance. To dispose a soul to action, we must upset its equilibrium.

  Eric Hoffer

  Loss, Upset, Soul

  Eric Hoffer (1963). “The Ordeal of Change”

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