Afoul Quotes & Sayings

Is language actually getting better, shorter, and easier? Nowadays we often hear exactly the opposite. Teenager slang is awful, students no longer learn Latin, our children - not to mention our president - cannot put together a grammatical sentence. The whimsical poet Ogden Nash was at least half serious in his "Laments for a dying language":

Coin brassy words at will, debase the coinage;
We're in an if-you-cannot-lick-them-join age,
A slovenliness-provides-its-own-excuse age,
Where usage overnight condones misusage.
Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,
Once English, now a vile orangutanguage. — Charles Yang

Japan is a startling clash of the deeply traditional and the spiritual. The intensely current and the superficial. It's ancient, but futuristic. Conservative, yet hedonistic. Sleek skyscrapers graze the clouds like trees seeking sun in a man-made rainforest. Their concrete foundations often fertilized by the bodies of locals run afoul of the yakuza. It's a homogenous island nation with a quaint surface and a Twin Peaks underbelly. The polite, insular, and eerily innocuous, living symbiotically with the perverse, extroverted, and bizarre. Fashion-forward and fashion-retarded. You could make similar generalizations about most cultures of course, but Japan's beautiful contrasts were better than most."--Parker Choi — Robet Jung

In our post-everything culture, obey has become a four-letter word. Obeying is for wimps. Obeying is for people who didn't do well enough on their SATs to write their own rules. Only the weak and the feeble and the young - -well, not even the young anymore - -need to obey. Funny, because the root of the word obey is from the French verb meaning "to listen, or to give ear to." It was never intended as a militant word, but one of hearing, of understanding. Of getting it. For a world obsessed with staying in constant communication, we aren't really very good listeners. — Heather Choate Davis

Romantic love has its place but to define relationship solely in romantic terms is like describing marriage only by what a couple does on their honeymoon. — Dermot Davis

A child being able to clearly and confidently articulate thoughts, ideals, and opinions have better self-esteem and they learn to deal with complex problems more effectively. — Hannah Raybans

Whatever he believed, he believed. It didn't matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man. — James McBride

Fern showed him an organizational plan that had the name Magnum Opus, Incorporated. It was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

And they lived horribly ever after, scaring the socks off all who fell afoul of them. — William Steig

Sometimes local, state and federal laws so clearly run afoul of the Constitution that the court must step in and strike them down. In most cases, the court performs this admirably and with great restraint. — Mike DeWine

Do whatever you like because life is short — Sujana

When the Sun sets, shadows, that shew'd at Noon But small, appear most long and terrible; So, when we think Fate hovers o'er our Heads, Our apprehensions shoot beyond all bounds, Owls, Ravens, Crickets seem the watch of death, Nature's worst Vermine scare her God-like Sons. Ecchoes the very leavings of a Voice, Grow babling Ghosts, and call us to our Graves: Each Mole-hill thought swells to a huge Olympus, While we fantastick Dreamers heave and puff, And sweat with an Imagination's weight ... — John Dryden

To maintain order in your bureaucratic life, you more or less have to stay home; go away for any length of time and you're always likely to run afoul of some agency or other. — Michel Houellebecq

Have you gone to Petitioners' Court, or talked to the Renselaeuses? When his grace the Marquis of Shevraeth was up at Tlanth during winter, he rode around the county with Lord Branaric and answered questions very freely, no matter who asked."
"No. I ... keep running afoul of him."
"Running afoul on political questions?" he asked.
"It never gets that far." I felt my face burn. "Purely personal questions
usually with me misconstruing his motivations. I can't ask him. — Sherwood Smith

Luck: when your burst of energy doesn't run afoul of someone else's. — Mignon McLaughlin

You do have to continue, as you grow as a human, checking in and going, 'Is this what I want? Am I giving away things that I don't want? Who am I and what do I want to keep doing?' — Mae Whitman

We were all meant to save many lives. God is always trying to save lives, and it seems like He usually uses the least likely people to do it. — Bob Goff

And that's the most horrible thing about censorship: To avoid falling afoul of the censors, we question ourselves and censor ourselves and make a big deal out of things in our heads. We do the work of the control freaks for them, out of a desire to avoid them. — G.R. Reader

it runs afoul of what i call the birdshit rule. you know, how people say it's good luck if a bird shits on you? and people believe it! i just want to grab them and say, 'dude, don't you realize this whole superstition was made up — John Green

When it seemed at every turn that the winds of fate had blown our lives afoul, financially, emotionally, or idealistically. Look at all that we endured. Look at all we managed to light along our path through the long shadow of adversity. Look at the seemingly indestructible affiliation that was once us. And look at us now. — Jonathan Evison

Unfortunately, though, even in our own time, the stigma that can attach to the cleverest person in the room sometimes intensifies if that person happens to be a woman. To imagine that Fuller could conduct herself as she did and never run afoul of gender prejudice is fanciful. To suppose that such biases were alone responsible for her troubles is equally so. — John Matteson

Good people don't smoke marijuana. — Jeff Sessions

As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in part, a longing
common enough among the inventors of heroes
to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only to fake. — Michael Chabon

Tragedy massages the human ego even as comedy deflates it ... Tragedy pits us against large foes and the trip wire is our own character ... In comedy we fall afoul of one another. Comedy depends on social life, on our behavior in groups. In tragedy you can observe one human against the gods. In comedy it's one human versus other humans and often one man (or woman if I'm writing it) against her own worst impulses. — Rita Mae Brown