Flapping Quotes - Page 2

• I love Toronto's long autumns, warm with windy swirls of golden spores, redolent with giant, sun-roasted leaves flapping up and down the streets, and horrible winter always seeming far, far off!

  Guy Maddin

  Autumn, Winter, Long

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• But it is rather derogatory that your dwelling-place should be only a neighborhood to a great city,--to live on an inclined plane.I do not like their cities and forts, with their morning and evening guns, and sails flapping in one's eye. I want a whole continent to breathe in, and a good deal of solitude and silence, such as all Wall Street cannot buy,--nor Broadway with its wooden pavement. I must live along the beach, on the southern shore, which looks directly out to sea,--and see what that great parade of water means, that dashes and roars, and has not yet wet me, as long as I have lived.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Beach, Morning, Wall

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Familiar Letters (Annotated Edition)”, p.59, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare, And left the flushed print in a poppy there: Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came, And the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame. With burnt mouth red like a lion's it drank The blood of the sun as he slaughtered sank, And dipped its cup in the purpurate shine When the eastern conduits ran with wine.

  Francis Thompson

  Summer, Wine, Fire

  James M. Byrne, Francis Thompson (2001). “God: thoughts in an age of uncertainty”, Continuum Intl Pub Group

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• History is often the tale of small moments—chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence—that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a butterfly’s wings that triggers a hurricane.

  Scott Anderson

  Butterfly, Wings, Decision

  Scott Anderson (2013). “Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East”, p.89, Anchor

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• Death's got an Invisibility Cloak?" Harry interrupted again. "So he can sneak up on people," said Ron. "Sometimes he gets bored of running at them, flapping his arms and shrieking.

  J. K. Rowling

  Death, Running, Humor

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• I want you to notice nature, how geese are in flight and they form a V in a leadership role…The lead goose, when he gets tired of flapping his wings, he drops to the back and the next goose comes up front. Without stopping, without fussing, without whining. He becomes that next leader, he or she, that’s what we have to do.

  Judy Bonds

  Tired, Wings, Leader

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• If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.

  Donna Tartt

  Skulls, Mind, Bats

  Donna Tartt (2011). “The Secret History”, p.204, 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.

  Neil Gaiman

  Dark, Night, Black

  Neil Gaiman (2009). “M Is for Magic”, p.25, Harper Collins

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• For some twenty years the window that opened at the end of the Cold War has been allowed to hang flapping in the wind. It is high time that the five nuclear-weapon states take seriously their commitment to negotiate toward nuclear disarmament.

  Hans Blix

  Military, War, Commitment

  Hans Blix (2008). “Why Nuclear Disarmament Matters”, p.37, MIT Press

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• Here in this ocean, in the midst of all this water, with the red flags on those distant buoys flapping in the sea breeze, I find myself unable to treat our house in Tokyo as anything but a dream.

  Banana Yoshimoto

  Dream, Ocean, Sea Breeze

  Banana Yoshimoto, Michael Emmerich (2002). “Goodbye Tsugumi”, p.104, Grove Press

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• They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tideline a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Weed, Beach, Eye

  Cormac McCarthy (2007). “The Road”, p.187, Vintage

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• The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does.

  Ian Stewart

  Butterfly, Wings, Atmosphere

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• We all ended up somewhere with our various uncertain lives flapping about us in tatters and our pockets full of foreign coins.

  Karen Elizabeth Gordon

  Adventure, Pockets, Coins

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• But the owls themselves are not hard to find, silent and on the wing, with their ear tufts flat against their heads as they fly and their huge wings alternately gliding and flapping as they maneuver through the trees. Athena's owl of wisdom and Merlin's companion, Archimedes, were screech owls surely, not this bird with the glassy gaze, restless on the bough, nothing but blood on its mind.

  Mary Oliver

  Blood, Wings, Bird

  Mary Oliver (2006). “Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays”, p.22, Beacon Press

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• All that changing of plates and flapping of napkins while you wait 40 minutes for your food.

  Hugh Casson

  Food, Waiting, Cooking

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• The artificial intelligence approach may not be altogether the right one to make to the problem of designing automatic assembly devices. Animals and machines are constructed from entirely different materials and on quite different principles. When engineers have tried to draw inspiration from a study of the way animals work they have usually been misled; the history of early attempts to construct flying machines with flapping wings illustrates this very clearly.

  Maurice Wilkes

  Inspiration, Animal, Wings

  "Computers Then and Now". Journal of the ACM 15, Sect. 4, (pp. 1-7), January 1968.

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• As those who have seen Jurassic Park will know, this means a tiny disturbance in one place, can cause a major change in another. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause rain in Central Park, New York. The trouble is, it is not repeatable. The next time the butterfly flaps its wings, a host of other things will be different, which will also influence the weather. That is why weather forecasts are so unreliable.

  Stephen Hawking

  New York, Rain, Butterfly

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• Descendants of pigeons once fed by Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin and many other famous lovers are still being fed, and the sudden sound when they all rise together, frightened away, is like the sound of giant sails flapping.

  Anais Nin

  Venice, Together, Sound

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