Seconds Quotes - Page 4

• To the audience, it's like I'm changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show's almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

  Steven Wright

  Song, Minutes, Notes

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• As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.

  Richard Russo

  Sleep, Thinking, Two

  FaceBook post by Richard Russo from Dec 28, 2010

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• Those five fingers and that palm were like a display case crammed full of everything I wanted to know--and everything I had to know. By taking my hand, she showed me what these things were. That within the real world, a place like this existed. In the space of those ten seconds I became I tiny bird, fluttering in the air, the wind rushing by. From high in the sky I could see a scene far away. It was so far off I couldn't make it out clearly, yet something was there, and I knew that someday I would travel to that place.

  Haruki Murakami

  Real, Air, Hands

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• If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it.

  Robert Wright

  Zero, Mean, Fighting

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• Life is like that - twenty minutes of misery for every two seconds of joy.

  Virginia C. Andrews

  Two, Joy, Life Is Like

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• If you can walk with the crowd and keep your virtue,
  Or walk with Kings-nor lose the common touch;
  If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
  If all men count with you, but none too much;
  If you can fill the unforgiving minute
  With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
  Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
  And - which is more - you'll be a man my son!

  Rudyard Kipling

  Life, Running, Hurt

  "If - " st. 4 (1910)

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• Do you know how sometimes - when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs - you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?

  Jodi Picoult

  Hurt, Riding Your Bike, Tumbling Down

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “My Sister's Keeper: A Novel”, p.218, Simon and Schuster

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• A hip-looking teen watches an elderly woman hobble across the street on a walker. "Grammy's here!" he shouts. He puts some MacAttack Mac&Cheese in the microwave and dons headphones and takes out a video game so he won't be bored during the forty seconds it takes his lunch to cook. A truck comes around the corner and hits Grammy, sending her flying over the roof into the backyard, where luckily she lands on a trampoline. Unluckily, she bounces back over the roof, into the front yard, landing on a rosebush.

  George Saunders

  Elderly, Land, Games

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• If this glorious birth to death hassle is the only hassle we are ever to have ..if our grand exhilarating fight of life is such a tragically short little scrap anyway,compared to the eons of rounds before and after-then why should one want to relinquish even a few precious seconds of it?

  Ken Kesey

  Fighting, Want, Littles

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• Mona knocked at the wrong time. “Uh…yeah…wait a minute, Mona -- ” Mona shouted through the door. “Room service, gentlemen. Just pull the covers up.” Michael grinned at Jon. “My roommate. Brace yourself.” Seconds later, Mona burst through the doorway with a tray of coffee and croissants. “Hi! I’m Nancy Drew! You must be the Hardy Boys!

  Armistead Maupin

  Coffee, Boys, Doors

  Armistead Maupin (1989). “Tales of the city ; More tales of the city ; Further tales of the city: an omnibus”, Vintage

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• Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play.

  Sam Shepard

  Hate, Play, Acting

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• I tell my kids in the Academy at Newcastle to watch Henry. He plays with such a swagger, not an arrogance, and that is a great quality. He always looks so comfortable. You talk about cars going from 0 to 60 in a matter of seconds, and he is like that. He just explodes. I could sit there for hours and watch him.

  Peter Beardsley

  Kids, Play, Car

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• In editing, it's amazing how you choose the in and out points. What you cut on is everything for creating tension. It's amazing how expanding a shot by five seconds can just ruin the tension.

  Sean Durkin

  Cutting, Editing, Creating

  "FUTURES| Sundance’s Golden Boy Sean Durkin, Director/Writer of 'Martha Marcy May Marlene'" by Nigel M. Smith, www.indiewire.com. October 20, 2011.

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• Cat will have you staked in five seconds flat.

  Cheyenne McCray

  Cat, Flats, Five

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• Our mind is a flowing something. It oscillates. Concentration is merely the continuous return to the same problem from a million angles.... So my problem is this: Can I bring the Lord back in my mind-flow every few seconds so that God shall always be in my mind?

  Frank Laubach

  Mind, Flow, Return

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• How about a new game show called 'Battle Begala?' Contestants would pick any obscure bad thing that happened anywhere in the world, and Paul would have 10 seconds to explain why it is President Bush's fault.

  Ann Coulter

  Games, Battle, President

  "CNN Crossfire", www.cnn.com. August 5, 2002.

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• There ain't nothing like being in the corner, and the trainer is whispering in your ear and another guy is putting in your mouthpiece. Five seconds to go, the boom! The bell. It's more exciting than looking down a cliff.

  George Foreman

  Boxing, Guy, Ears

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• When you're jumping, it's just an aggressiveness, but I think the exhilaration and the fun comes after you make the bar and you're falling. That's the best part - a few seconds to celebrate and relax.

  Jenn Suhr

  Fun, Fall, Thinking

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• One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Sports, Ocean, Air

  Henry David Thoreau (2008). “Cape Cod: Illustrated Edition of the American Classic”, p.102, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When the mind is relaxed, no longer making an effort, when it is quiet for just a few seconds, then the problem reveals itself and it is solved. That happens when the mind is still, in the interval between two thoughts, between two responses. In that state of mind, understanding comes.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Two, Effort, Meditation

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (1991). “The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti”, Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company

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• Villeneuve is now twelve seconds ahead of Villeneuve.

  Murray Walker

  Funny, Motor Racing, Twelve

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• And he's done that in a whisker under 10 seconds, call it 9.7 in round figures.

  Murray Walker

  Funny, Motor Racing, Done

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• TV spots are short. If you can't hold folks' attention for 20 seconds before revealing the brand, find another line of work.

  Lee Clow

  Attention, Lines, Tvs

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• It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn't so.

  Gillian Flynn

  Night, Daylight, Hours

  Gillian Flynn (2009). “Dark Places: A Novel”, p.108, Broadway Books

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• I love who I am and I love my life, but if I could be someone else, I'd be Beyonce in two seconds.

  Dakota Fanning

  Two, Who I Am, Love Of My Life

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