Ball Of Wind Quotes & Sayings

The night in question, I had put aside my perpetual lavatory read, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because of all the manuscripts (inedible green tomatoes) submitted to Cavendish-Redux, my new stable of champions. I suppose it was about eleven o'clock when I heard my front door being interfered with. Skinhead munchkins mug-or-treating?
Cherry knockers? The wind?
Next thing I knew, the door flew in off its ruddy hinges! I was thinking al-Queda, I was thinking ball lightning, but no. Down the hallway tramped what seemed like an entire rugby team, though the intruders numbered only three. (You'll notice, I am always attacked in threes.) "Timothy," pronounced the gargoyliest, "Cavendish, I presume. Caught with your cacks down."
"My business hours are eleven to two, gentlemen," Bogart would have said, "with a three-hour break for lunch. Kindly leave." All I could do was blurt, "Oy! My door! My ruddy door! — David Mitchell

There isn't a single windmill owner in Holland who doesn't have a second job, for when there is no wind. — Johnny Ball

She was walking toward the beauty shop when Shay came out the door moving fast. The first thing Jill noticed was Shay's hair and how it appeared really big. As Shay drew closer, Jill realized she looked like she was wearing a mask with big blue streaks over the eyes and giant red pouty lips. "What happened to you?" Jill asked in shock. "I'm not sure," Shay said, looking just as stunned. "One minute, I was reading a magazine, and the next, two women that looked like Dolly Parton descended on me like vultures. They started putting stuff on my face, then they did all kinds of things to my hair." Anne walked out of the shop next; her Napoleon hat 'do rode higher than ever. Ella followed with her little red hair ball reinflated. "Doesn't Shay just look beautiful?" Ella chirped. She looked like a hooker who'd just survived a wind tunnel, but Jill nodded and tried to smile. — Robin Alexander

Golf is no longer a game of hitting the ball, finding it, and hitting it again. There is wind to be measured, whether that means tossing blades of grass in the air or studying the gentle movement of 60-foot high branches. There are caddie conferences for even the most routine shots. There are sports psychologists who tell players not to hit until they're ready. — Doug Ferguson

They whirled around in the light dance of a duchess entering a ball - majestic yet understated - a spiraling splash of purity of color that took shape under nature's watch. A newly-sculpted garden burst forth, glistening in an afternoon sun. It welcomed the dusty pink rose, who stood beside its fellows, basked themselves in their own serenity of white, triumphant red, or cheery yellow. It swayed in the breath of a wind, caressing each and becoming more. It was a mixture of quiet and thunderous, light and dark, shyness and boldness. It was a mixture of the quiet strength and overwhelming courage that the human soul might wish to one day possess. — Gina Marinello-Sweeney

Everything the Power of the World does is in a circle. The Sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball and so are all the stars. The Wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles ... The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. — John Neihardt

I always loved hitting a low fade to a back-right pin with the wind howling from the right. Not many guys could get it close in that situation, because they kept it low by just putting the ball back in their stance. You see, playing the ball back turns you into a one-trick pony - you can only hit hooks. — Lee Trevino

The storm is master. Man, as a ball, is tossed twixt winds and billows. — Friedrich Schiller

Every morning he went for a walk with his wife, Reine-Marie, and their German shepherd Henri. Tossing the tennis ball ahead of them, they ended up chasing it down themselves when Henri became distracted by a fluttering leaf, or a black fly, or the voices in his head. The dog would race after the ball, then stop and stare into thin air, moving his gigantic satellite ears this way and that. Honing in on some message. Not tense, but quizzical. It was, Gamache recognized, the way most people listened when they heard on the wind the wisps of a particularly beloved piece of music. Or a familiar voice from far away. — Louise Penny

Eye on the shuttlecock, she ran forward, raised her battledore high, and slammed right into Henry Weston's chest. The wind knocked from her, Emma lost her balance and might have fallen had not Mr. Weston's arms shot out and caught her about the waist and shoulder. "Oh," she cried, embarrassed to have plowed into the man. Embarrassed to find his arms around her. Embarrassed to find she liked it. "I'm so sorry," she blurted, pushing away from him. "Don't be. I admire your singular focus. My goodness, Miss Smallwood, where is the timid little creature who flinched at every flying bird as though it were a cricket ball headed for her nose?" Emma straightened and righted her off-kilter bonnet. "I was determined not to embarrass myself," she admittedly breathlessly. "Only to do just that." He chuckled, and their eyes met in a moment of shared levity. Then he sobered. "Thank you for the laugh, Miss Smallwood. Just what I needed after yesterday. — Julie Klassen

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.
So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

What's your name?" he asked above the roar of the music.
She leaned close. "My name is Wind," she whispered. "And Rain. And Bone and Dust. My name is a snippet of a half-remembered song."
He chuckled a low, delightful sound. She was drunk and silly, and so full of the glory of being young and alive and in the capital of the world that she could hardly contain herself.
"I have no name," she purred. "I am whoever the keepers of my fate tell me to be."
He grasped her by her wrist, running a thumb along the sensitive sknin underneath. "Then let me call you Mine for a dance or two. — Sarah J. Maas

Or there, in the clay-baked piedmont of the South, that lean and tan-faced boy who sprawls there in the creaking chair among admiring cronies before the open doorways of the fire department, and tells them how he pitched the team to shut-out victory to-day. What visions burn, what dreams possess him, seeker of the night? The packed stands of the stadium, the bleachers sweltering with their unshaded hordes, the faultless velvet of the diamond, unlike the clay-balked outfields down in Georgia. The mounting roar of eighty thousand voices and Gehrig coming up to bat, the boy himself upon the pitching mound, the lean face steady as a hound's; then the nod, the signal, and the wind-up, the rawhide arm that snaps and crackles like a whip, the small white bullet of the blazing ball, its loud report in the oiled pocket of the catcher's mitt, the umpire's thumb jerked upwards, the clean strike. — Thomas Wolfe

God works in mysterious ways, baby, and there is never more evidence of this than when your life is going along fairly well, actually sailing. The sensation of wind through your hair becomes, for an extremely brief time, commonplace. It is then that God lowers the cosmic boom. He will not show up; that is the kind view. The unkind view is that he sits back to watch with a high-ball and a bowl of nuts. — Suzanne Finnamore

The world might be sunny-side up today.
The big ball of yellow might be spilling into the clouds, runny and yolky and blurring into the bluest sky, bright with cold hope and false promises about fond memories, real families, hearty breakfasts, stacks of pancakes drizzled in maple syrup sitting on a plate in a world that doesn't exist anymore.
Or maybe not.
Maybe it's dark and wet today, whistling wind so sharp it stings the skin off the knuckles of grown men. Maybe it's snowing, maybe it's raining, I don't know maybe it's freezing it's hailing it's a hurricane slip slipping into a tornado and the earth is quaking apart to make room for our mistakes. — Tahereh Mafi

Beauty is in the strangest places. A piece of garbage floating in the wind. And that beauty exists in America. It exists everywhere. You have to develop an eye for it and be able to see it. — Alan Ball

Zeus it seems has given us from youth to old age a nice ball of wool to wind-nothing but wars upon wars until we shall perish every one. — Homer

There is the moment when the silence of the countryside gathers in the ear and breaks into a myriad of sounds:a croaking and squeaking, a swift rustle in the grass, a plop in the water, a pattering on earth and pebbles, and high above all, the call of the cicada, The sounds follow one another, and the ear eventually discerns more and more of them -just as fingers unwinding a ball of wool feel each fiber interwoven with progressively thinner and less palpable threads, The frogs continue croaking in the background without changing the flow of sounds, just as light does not vary from the continues winking of stars, But at every rise or fall of the wind every sound changes and is renewed. All that remains in the inner recess of the ear is a vague murmur: the sea. — Italo Calvino

As children, we were given a choice between the talented but erratic hare and the plodding but steady tortoise. The lesson was supposed to be that slow and steady wins the race. But, really, did any of us ever want to be the tortoise? No, we just wanted to be a less foolish hare. We wanted to be swift as the wind and a bit more strategic - say, not taking quite so many snoozes before the finish line. After all, everyone knows you have to show up in order to win. The story of the tortoise and the hare, in trying to put forward the power of effort, gave effort a bad name. It reinforced the image that effort is for the plodders and suggested that in rare instances, when talented people dropped the ball, the plodder could sneak through. — Carol S. Dweck

The wind picked up. The power went out. The windows rattled. I took an Ambien and curled into a ball and tried to hide from the dark and the wind in the bed that had been ours, the first bed I'd ever shared with someone who loved me and picked me and then changed his mind. — Lindy West

The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours ... — Black Elk

I am a black stone, the size of a kitchen stove. They wash me in the stream every summer and sing over me. I am skulls and cocks, spring rain and the blood of the bull. Virgins lie with strangers in my name, the young priests throw pieces of themselves at my stone feet. I am white corn, and the wind in the corn, and the earth whereof the corn stands up, and the blind worms rolled in an oozy ball of love at the corn's roots. I am rut and flood and honeybees. — Peter S. Beagle

I rolled the ball of muffin and I waited and after my mother said, "That you should really take a multivitamin," my father threw up his hands in disgust, and I was positive I had no family at all, certain it was not my mother but the solar wind that carried me into the universe. — Alison Espach

And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball. — Eduardo Galeano

You're not just looking up into a curtain of black. You're looking into the eye of the universe. Stare for a while and you start to realize -- on a deep, gut level -- that the moon is a giant rock circling us in space. The sun is a violent, fusion-fueled ball of plasma and gas millions of miles away that destroyed the atmospheres of all of the inner planets (including Mars, which is farther away from it than we are) and would do the same to ours if we weren't lucky enough to have a magnetic field that diverts the solar wind. The cute little pinpricks of light you see out there are other giant, explosive, incredibly pissed-off balls of gas floating in an infinite void, most of which are far more impressive than our puny sun. And that smear of milky white through the sky? That's the center of our own galaxy -- a gigantic pinwheel circling a supermassive black hole like floating detritus around the vortex of a flushing toilet. — Johnny B. Truant

What I'm feeling, I think, is joy. And it's been some time since I've felt that blinkered rush of happiness, This might be one of those rare events that lasts, one that'll be remembered and recalled as months and years wind and ravel. One of those sweet, significant moments that leaves a footprint in your mind. A photograph couldn't ever tell its story. It's like something you have to live to understand. One of those freak collisions of fizzing meteors and looming celestial bodies and floating debris and one single beautiful red ball that bursts into your life and through your body like an enormous firework. Where things shift into focus for a moment, and everything makes sense. And it becomes one of those things inside you, a pearl among sludge, one of those big exaggerated memories you can invoke at any moment to peel away a little layer of how you felt, like a lick of ice cream. The flavor of grace. — Craig Silvey

I took a couple steps away from him and stopped in front of a framed colored poster of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable from the movie Gone with the Wind. I studied the pair, Gable with his mysterious mustache and Leigh in her red ball gown. I'd become a fan of the classic, partially because of my mother's suggestion that I looked a lot like a younger Vivien Leigh, with my dark wavy hair and sea green eyes. And as usual, I'd believed her for a little while. — J.C. Patrick

There has always been the wind.
Since our planet began to turn, there has been the wind. This ball of dirt and fire and water started to spin. The air stirred. And Earth's time began.
But the beginnings of the wind are lost in the mists of time. The wind blew before the Appian Way wended through Rome. It blew before the Parthenon crowned Athens. Before pyramids sprang up in Egypt.
Before the Mayans. Before the Incas.
Before Man. — Kaye George

But the black kitten had been finished with earlier in the afternoon, and so, while Alice was sitting curled up in a corner of the great arm-chair, half talking to herself and half asleep, the kitten had been having a grand game of romps with the ball of worsted Alice had been trying to wind up, and had been rolling it up and down till it had all come undone again; and there it was, spread over the hearth-rug, all knots and tangles, with the kitten running after its own tail in the middle. — Lewis Carroll

Just find your way, like a river settling into its bed, and the sigh of the wind over a lake, light but restful ... content with the joy in the arc of an arm throwing a ball for a dog to fetch, the ease of the grassy slope stretching away, birds in the trees singing sweet high notes, flowers growing close in the ditch. — Jay Woodman

Cambodian dust whipped up in the wind and stuck to my clothes like clay. I put a hand between my face and the sun and blinked Phnom Penn dust from my tired eyes. One idea, drink, beamed light in all directions across my dark consciousness.
A slim lady walked toward me with a big smile and a bigger head. Her left hand rested on her waggling hips and her right hand rose above her head, limp-wristed, like she'd just thrown a winning ball toward a basket and was leaving her hand in the shot position. The lady walking toward me was a man. At least that much was clear, but the nature or our relationship was still a fog to me. She wore blue jeans and a white top accentuating her breasts, but her Adam's apple and cow sized hands revealed more in daylight than she could hide at night. — Craig Stone

If the wind is in your face, you swing too hard just to get the ball through it; if the wind is at your back, you swing too hard just to see how far you can get the ball to go. — Henry Beard

Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. — Frank Morton McMurry

You'd think a house would last forever, but the truth is a strong wind or a wrecking ball can devastate it. The family inside is not so different. — Jodi Picoult

I learned that you can't predict your future, there's no crystal ball or formula for happiness. You can't control the weather just like you can't control the way others behave, but what you can control is how much love you give. Surrendering to this crazy thing called life is hard, but we don't have to be the soulless sheets of paper tarrying along in the wind. We can find our people, love, respect them, and then hang on for dear life because it's not where you go on this journey but who you're with that matters the most. — Renee Carlino

I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven's gate Built in Jerusalem's wall. — William Blake

I tried to convince myself once, when I was a teenager, that I felt God. Alone in the sanctuary, accompanying my mom on an evening errand to the church. I stared at the ceiling and drew deep breath as quickly as I could. I told our youth minister in his ball cap that I had felt Him. That I was blessed.
But in the end, it was only the wind and the rain, making noise in the darkness. — Darin Bradley

One day, while he was idly reciting his verses to a captive audience, a scrap of paper, borne by the wind, landed on his lap. On it were written two words: "Layla" and "Majnun." As the crowd watched, Majnun tore the paper in half. The half on which was written "Layla" he crumpled into a ball and threw over his shoulder; the half with his own name he kept for himself.
"What does this mean?" someone asked.
"Do you not realize that one name is better than two?" Majnun replied. "If only you knew the reality of love, you would see that when you scratch a lover, you find his beloved."
"But why throw away Layla's name and not your own?" asked another.
Majnun glowered at the man. "The name is a shell and nothing more. It is what the shell hides that counts. I am the shell and Layla is the pearl; I am the veil and she is the face beneath it."
The crowd, though they knew not the meaning of his words, were amazed by the sweetness of his tongue. — Reza Aslan