To stand up straight and tread the turning mill, To lie flat and know nothing and be still, Are the two trades of man; and which is worse I know not, but I know that both are ill.
I wish wearing flat-irons on our heads would keep us from growing up. But buds will be roses, and kittens, cats, - more's the pity!
In this world one is seldom reduced to make a selection between two alternatives. There are as many varieties of conduct and opinion as there are turns of feature between an aquiline nose and a flat one.
A long time ago people believed that the world is flat and the moon is made of green cheese. Some still do, to this day. The man on the moon is looking down and laughing.
The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other...they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down...
A writer need not be bound by flat statement like "It was a rough sea," when verbs like and and wait to spell from her pen.
Charles realized that if he were going to apologize to Chrestomanci, he had better do it at once. He turned around to say it. But the folds had already rippled flat and nothing was the same anymore....
The joy and laughter and youth they brought was an antidote to the somberness enveloping his flat, the hours when he felt the very walls and ceilings were encrusted with the distress of of unhappy decades
I think racial profiling is wrong. It cannot be defended. It's just flat wrong. And if a matter came before me, and it could be established that the arrest was made strictly on racial profiling, when I was on the bench, it would be gone.
There's very little about being in a functional-M.R.I. scanner that is natural: you are flat on your back, absolutely still, with your head immobilized by pillows and straps. The scanner makes a dreadful din, which headphones barely muffle.
Sir Gordon Richards was the most successful jockey - flat or jumps - there's ever been: champion jockey for 26 years. He set a record of 269 winners in the season 55 years before I broke it. That was my greatest achievement.
When you're in elected office, you always have to operate under the assumption that you're in a dog fight for re-election. It's when you don't prepare for a tough battle, when you're caught flat-footed, that you're vulnerable.
When imagination fails, compassion and humaneness dwindle and atrophy along with it. Unleavened by imagination, the variety and richness of life turn into flat abstractions; people become objects to be manipulated -- with the social consequences we k...
As to the effect of the wave on the air, we will suppose the water to be quite flat and the air motionless, a heavy undulation comes on the scene, it has to pass, so it pushes the air up with its face, letting it fall again as its back glides onwards...
The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.
I think a lot of playwrights have a script in their bottom drawer that hopefully no one will ever see about a bunch of young people sharing a flat and getting up to crazy stuff.
When I did it, I was a starving musician in London in a basement flat, but a simple tune with the right singer or the right situation can become very well liked and accepted. I'm only too pleased to say it happened with that one.
I have never seen a ghost. But yes, I believe because I know too many people who have had experiences. When I lived in Notting Hill, I shared a flat with a mate who was convinced that there was a presence in our house.
Recreating the experience of, say, bereavement in my own head is pretty rough. I was used to switching off from emotions every day of my working life as a journalist, but in fiction, you have to feel it 100%, or else it's a flat experience for the re...
I think that a lot of guys reach for electronics first, but the truth is that you can never keep up with electronics. You buy a flat-screen TV, and then six months later, there's one that has 3D and Blu-ray and all this business, and that is just goi...
In the business world, I did fairly well, but wasn't happy. A bout of sciatica put me flat on my back. All I could do was read, listen to my mother's stories about the Sandovals, and daydream: a return to self. My writing career had begun.