Shuffling Quotes - Page 2

• The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way-- a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable

  Robert James Waller

  August, Strange Places, Retrospect

  The Bridge of Madison County (pp. 22-3)

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• I don't know, on a sitcom, and in theatre especially, you have to really be listening to an audience. And if you're losing them, you can hear the sniffs, and the playbills shuffling and whatnot.

  Neil Patrick Harris

  Listening, Theatre, Losing

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. September 16, 2008.

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• I missed the sound of her shuffling her homework while I listened to music on her bed. I missed the cold of her feet against my legs when she climbed into bed. I missed the shape of her shadow where it fell across the page of my book. I missed the smell of her hair and the sound of her breath and my Rilke on her nightstand and her wet towel thrown over the back of her desk chair. It felt like I should be sated after having a whole day with her, but it just made me miss her more.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Book, Smell, Feet

  Maggie Stiefvater (2011). “Linger”, p.289, Scholastic Inc.

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• Waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.

  Dennis Lehane

  Past, Order, Waking

  Dennis Lehane (2010). “Shutter Island”, p.22, Hachette UK

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• There was something about clowns that was worse than zombies. (Or maybe something that was the same. When you see a zombie, you want to laugh at first. When you see a clown, most people get a little nervous. There's the pallor and the cakey mortician-style makeup, the shuffling and the untidy hair. But clowns were probably malicious, and they moved fast on those little bicycles and in those little crammed cars. Zombies weren't much of anything. They didn't carry musical instruments and they didn't care whether or not you laughed at them. You always knew what zombies wanted.)

  Kelly Link

  Makeup, Hair, People

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• I won't put in a load of laundry, because the machine is too loud and would drown out other, more significant noises - namely, the shuffling footsteps of the living dead.

  David Sedaris

  Machines, Noise, Laundry

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• The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.

  Hilary Mantel

  Attitude, Thinking, Trying

  Hilary Mantel (2013). “Three-Book Edition: A Place of Greater Safety; Beyond Black; The Giant O’Brien”, p.147, HarperCollins UK

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• Don't equate activity with efficiency. You are paying your key people to see the big picture. Don't let them get bogged down in a lot of meaningless meetings and paper shuffling. Announce a Friday afternoon off once in a while. Cancel a Monday morning meeting or two. Tell the cast of characters you'd like them to spend the amount of time normally spent preparing for attending the meeting at their desks, simply thinking about an original idea.

  Harvey Mackay

  Friday, Monday, Morning

  Harvey Mackay (1996). “Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, & Outnegotiate Your Competition”, Ballantine Books

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• Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Light, Ashes, World

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “The Road”, p.4, Pan Macmillan

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• I stood for almost an hour in a line of shuffling, bitter - eyed late mailers (Christmas is such a carefree, low - pressure time - that's one of the things I love about it).

  Stephen King

  Things I Love, Lines, Pressure

  Stephen King (1999). “Bag of Bones”, p.58, Simon and Schuster

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• Into the mercy seat I climb My head is shaved, my head is wired And like a moth that tries To enter the bright eye I go shuffling out of life Just to hide in death awhile And anyway I never lied.

  Nick Cave

  Eye, Trying, Mercy

  Nick Cave (2007). “The Complete Lyrics: 1978-2013”, p.147, Penguin UK

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• But Noah, you're not supposed to do this, and I can't let you. So go back to your room." Then smiling softly and sniffling and shuffling some papers on the desk, she says: "Me, I'm going downstairs for some coffee. I won't be back to check on your for a while, so don't do anything foolish." She rises quickly, touches my arm, and walks toward the stairs. She doesn't look back, and suddenly I am alone. I don't know what to think. I look at where she had been sitting and see her coffee, a full cup, still steaming, and once again I learn that there are good people in the world.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Coffee, Thinking, People

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• Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.

  Richard Dawkins

  Hands, Forever, Survival

  Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition”, p.56, Oxford University Press

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• Probably the most important aspect of individual defensive play is the 'close-out.' This approach to the ball should be made in a 'step-drag action' with advanced foot moving forward first and then the back foot in a boxer's type shuffling of the feet.

  Tex Winter

  Basketball, Moving, Play

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• They say the cure is about happiness, but I understand now that it isn't, and it never was. It's about fear: fear of pain, fear of hurt, fear, fear, fear - a blind animal existence, bumping between walls, shuffling between ever-narrowing hallways, terrified and dull and stupid.

  Lauren Oliver

  Hurt, Wall, Pain

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• If America were in a just war I'd volunteer for the front line. I'd do the shuffling and win the war.

  Muhammad Ali

  War, Winning, America

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• I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

  Virginia Woolf

  Feet, Long, Broken

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.176, Virginia Woolf

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• There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Hate, Years, Squad

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• So this was a nest of radicals. She thought a hotbed of sedition would involve more gunpowder and secret handshakes, and less shuffling of feet and passing the sugar.

  Frances Hardinge

  Feet, Secret, Nests

  Frances Hardinge (2011). “Fly By Night”, p.347, Pan Macmillan

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• The heavy trees,
  The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust,
  The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines
  Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.

  Wallace Stevens

  Blue, Tree, Feelings

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.191, Vintage

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• One of the best ways to properly evaluate and adapt to the many environmental stresses of life is to simply view them as normal. The adversity and failures in our lives, if adapted to and viewed as normal corrective feedback to use to get back on target, serve to develop in us an immunity against anxiety, depression, and the adverse responses to stress. Instead of tackling the most important priorities that would make us successful and effective in life, we prefer the path of least resistance and do things simply that will relieve our tension, such as shuffling papers and majoring in minors.

  Denis Waitley

  Stress, Adversity, Successful

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• Whether you're shuffling a deck of cards or holding your breath, magic is pretty simple: It comes down to training, practice, and experimentation , followed up by ridiculous pursuit and relentless perseverance.

  David Blaine

  Perseverance, Simple, Practice

  Interview with Adam Kimmel, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 27, 2010.

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• We can talk about republican or democratic approaches to the economy, but until you fix the student loan bubble - and that's where the real bubble is - and the tuition bubble, we don't have a chance. All this other stuff is shuffling deck-chairs on the Titanic.

  Mark Cuban

  Real, Tuition, Stuff

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• I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's -- there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is.

  Tom Stoppard

  Fall, Thinking, Elephants

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• I have never been able to understand why the tax comes as such a body blow to many people since the rate on long-term capital gain is lower than on most likes of endeavor (tax policy indicated digging ditches is regarded as socially less desirable than shuffling stock certificates).

  Warren Buffett

  Blow, Long, People

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