Quotes & Sayings About Being On Your Toes

The women look each other over as they chat, measuring thighs, bellies, hips, and asses, taking into account body types and recent pregnancies. They silently evaluate and pass judgment, realigning themselves in the pecking order. It's a brutal business, being a woman. Wendy sucks in her gut and crosses her legs, pointing her toes like a ballerina in a last-ditch effort to coax her calf muscle out of hiding. She has our mother's legs, sheathed in thick, smooth skin that defies definition. — Jonathan Tropper

I wanted to scream as I stood there, my toes hanging over the edge of the dock. I wanted to let a gut-wrenching howl rip from my disfigured throat toward those clouded skies. I wanted to say every swear word my mother had ever taught me not to say.
I would have settled for a cut-off whimper, just as long as some kind of sound came from my lips. — Keary Taylor

Punishments included hanging by the thumbs, toes barely touching the ground; bucking and gagging, being trussed like a turkey with a bit cutting the mouth; spread-eagling on a spare wheel, mocking crucifixion; flogging; and branding. — Michael C.C. Adams

Her nerves gathered together so quickly, Gennie nearly dropped the five pounds of briquettes on the ground. When she'd finished being exasperated with herself, she laughed and poured a neat pile of charcoal into the barbecue pit. So this was the coolly sophisticated Genvieve Grandeau, she thought wryly;established member of the art world and genteel New Orleans society,about to drop five pounds of charcoal on her toes because a rude man was going to have dinner with her. How the mighty have fallen. — Nora Roberts

She felt as though her nerves were strings being strained tighter and tighter on some sort of screwing peg. She felt her eyes opening wider and wider, her fingers and toes twitching nervously, something within oppressing her breathing, while all shapes and sounds seemed in the uncertain half-light to strike her with unaccustomed vividness. Moments of doubt were continually coming upon her, when she was uncertain whether the train were going forwards or backwards, or were standing still altogether; whether it were Annushka at her side or a stranger. "What's that on the arm of the chair, a fur cloak or some beast? And what am I myself? Myself or some other woman?" She was afraid of giving way to this delirium. But something drew her towards it, and she could yield to it or resist it at will. — Leo Tolstoy

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but didn't we just get beat up for not being fags?"

"Sorry, you just don't scream hetero he-man, dude. I wouldn't call you flaming or anything, but let's just say your toes are singed. Hell, I read straighter than you do."

"I hate to break it to you, but I'm probably too drunk to fuck. — Elle Parker

She was slowly being overwhelmed by his scent, the feel of his hands on her and the taste of him. His arms tightened around her until she felt almost weightless on her toes. His lips moved along her neck and she heard the soft sigh of pleasure escape her lips and realized there was no choice for her to make. She'd already made it the day she'd met him. — Donna Augustine

I felt the back of my neck prickle. I was being watched. I knew this even before I slowly turned around, knew it like I knew I had ten fingers and ten toes. — Marie Rutkoski

Of course I want you," she said right in his ear. "I love you." He let loose some kind of hoarse word, and his arms crushed her to him. As she found herself not being able to breathe because he was squeezing her so tight, she thought, Yup, this really was him. And he wasn't going to let her go this time. Thank. God. As he held Jane up off the ground, Vishous was wholly happy. Complete in a way that having all your fingers and toes couldn't hold a candle to. With a shout of triumph, he carried her into her condo, pausing only to put the garage door down. — J.R. Ward

God sent Jesus to join the human experience, which means to make a lot of mistakes. Jesus didn't arrive here knowing how to walk. He had fingers and toes, confusion, sexual feelings, crazy human internal processes. He had the same prejudices as the rest of his tribe: he had to learn that the Canaanite woman was a person. He had to suffer the hardships and tedium and setbacks of being a regular person. If he hadn't the incarnation would mean nothing. — Anne Lamott

Well, you are awfully pale." I exhaled slowly. Refused to look up. He reached for my bare foot and squeezed my toes. "And cold." I pulled my feet away. "Bad circulation." "You could always bite me, just to test.I hate you, too, by the way. Just so you know." "Oh, I do. I would suggest make-up sex, but ... " "Too bad you have scruples," I said. "Now you're just being cruel." "I like pushing your buttons." "You'd enjoy it more if you undid them first." Save me. "I think I should go and help Daniel." "With what?" "Anything." Noah stood. There was a mischievous smile on his lips as he left. — Michelle Hodkin

There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being. — Aleksandar Hemon

Oh, I'm being eaten By a boa constrictor, A boa constrictor, A boa constrictor, I'm being eaten by a boa constrictor, And I don't like it
one bit. Well, what do you know? It's nibblin' my toe. Oh, gee, It's up to my knee. Oh my, It's up to my thigh. Oh, fiddle, It's up to my middle. Oh, heck, It's up to my neck. Oh, dread, It's upmmmmmmmmmmffffffffff ... — Shel Silverstein

I sat down with little time to prepare for my back being ambushed by the wintry digits otherwise known as Tetra's toes. — G.L. Tomas

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. Some part of our being knows this is from where we came. We long to return. These aspirations are not, I think, irreverent, although they may trouble whatever gods may be. — Carl Sagan

Because there's no way I can do that."

"Yes, there is." He reached out, startling me, and pressed his palm to my cheek.

Almost immediately, a sense of well-being flooded through me, a blissful numbness that started at the top of my head and spread all the way down to my toes. "Seriously, best powers ever," I mumbled drowsily.

"Go to bed, Sophie," he said, dropping his hand as if my skin had burned him. — Rachel Hawkins

The best position for spanking girls is over the knees in such a way that your fingertips and toes just touch the ground and your bottom is at an angle that makes it easy for the spanker to maintain a metronome beat. There is something overwhelmingly feminine being exposed in this way, breasts full and pendulous, eyes pressed shut, your mind clear and your body free to plunge into absolute sensation. — Chloe Thurlow

Said all the dwarves. "Dark for dark business! There are many hours before dawn." "Of course!" said Bilbo, and sat down in a hurry. He missed the stool and sat in the fender, knocking over the poker and shovel with a crash. "Hush!" said Gandalf. "Let Thorin speak!" And this is how Thorin began. "Gandalf, dwarves and Mr. Baggins! We are met together in the house of our friend and fellow conspirator, this most excellent and audacious hobbit - may the hair on his toes never fall out! all praise to his wine and ale! - " He paused for breath and for a polite remark from the hobbit, but the compliments were quite lost on poor Bilbo Baggins, who was wagging his mouth in protest at being called audacious and worst of all fellow conspirator, though no noise came out, he was so flummoxed. So Thorin went on: "We are met to discuss our plans, our ways, — J.R.R. Tolkien

When it's going well, stand-up is the best thing in the world, but when it's not, it feels like all your toes are being pulled off one by one. — Jennifer Coolidge

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour
landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ...
But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? — Virginia Woolf

Believing himself to be unseen by other bathers, he gave himself up to being alone with his body. He wriggled his toes, breathed hard through his nose, twisted his brown moustache where some drops of water still clung, and looked himself critically all over. The scrutiny seemed to satisfy him, as well as it might. I, whose only acquaintance was with bodies and minds developing, was suddenly confronted by maturity in its most undeniable form; and I wondered, what must it feel like to be him, master of those limbs which have passed beyond the need of gym and playing field, and exist for their own beauty and strength? What can they do, I thought, to be conscious of themselves? — L.P. Hartley

It was like being alive twice, seeing the world twice, and the new vision came through the eyes of a small, curious, unstoppable being who had never seen it before. We had our own little mindfulness coach, reminding us that when all else fails us in this life we can love our own toes, or the velvet coolness of a dog's ear, or his downy fur. People told us how we would fall in love with our baby, but not how through him we would fall in love with everything else again too. — Susanne Antonetta

Such is the nature of an expatriate life. Stripped of romance, perhaps that's what being an expat is all about: a sense of not wholly belonging. [ ... ] The insider-outsider dichotomy gives life a degree of tension. Not of a needling, negative variety but rather a keep-on-your-toes sort of tension that can plunge or peak with sudden rushes of love or anger. Learning to recognise and interpret cultural behaviour is a vital step forward for expats anywhere, but it doesn't mean that you grow to appreciate all the differences. — Sarah Turnbull

The advantage of being lovers is that we have to work hard at our relationship, because everything conspires to drive us apart. Our decision to be together has to be renewed again and again; that keeps us on our toes. — Isabel Allende

Other people would want to sentimentalize about the old days, but the great thing about traveling with Pluto was that he only cared about you to the extent that you were interesting to him now. In that way he kept you on your toes. No aspect of the relationship could be counterfeited when it was being minted anew from moment to moment. "I — Neal Stephenson

Everything is extraordinarily clear. I see the whole landscape before me, I see my hands, my feet, my toes, and I smell the rich river mud. I feel a sense of tremendous strangeness and wonder at being alive. Wonder of wonders. — Gautama Buddha

After that she'd have to go elsewhere anyway for breadth of experience. A different part of the world where she would develop expertise in more than frostbite, and lost toes, and idiots frozen to their fishing poles. But Rue, followed by Ben, followed by Rigel and Orion, had put a stop to that plan too; children being the enemies of plans and anything new besides themselves. — Laurie Frankel

People ask me if my shoes were too small when I was a kid and I say it wouldn't matter how fight my shoes were, I just liked that feeling of them being in there. That's how I started tapping my toes. — Nomar Garciaparra

When all are undressed, one is somehow not ashamed, but when one's the only one undressed and everybody is looking, it's degrading,' he kept repeating to himself, again and again. 'It's like a dream, I've sometimes dreamed of being in such degrading positions.' It was a misery to him to take off his socks. They were very dirty, and so were his underclothes, and now everyone could see it. And what was worse, he disliked his feet. All his life he had thought both his big toes hideous. He particularly loathed the coarse, flat, crooked nail on the right one, and now they would all see it. Feeling intolerably ashamed made him, at once and intentionally, rougher. He pulled off his shirt, himself. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

All these mountains of Irish dead, all these corpses mangled beyond recognition, all these arms, legs, eyes, ears, fingers, toes, hands, all these shivering putrefying bodies and portions of bodies once warm living and tender parts of Irish men and youths - all these horrors in Flanders or the Gallipoli Peninsula, are all items in the price Ireland pays for being part of the British Empire. — James Connolly

If we were taught to cook as we are taught to walk, encouraged first to feel for pebbles with our toes, then to wobble forward and fall, then had our hands firmly tugged on so we would try again, we would learn that being good at it relies on something deeply rooted, akin to walking, to get good at which we need only guidance, senses, and a little faith. We aren't often taught to cook like that, so when we watch people cook naturally, in what looks like an agreement between cook and cooked, we think that they were born with an ability to simply know that an egg is done, that the fish needs flipping, and that the soup needs salt. Instinct, whether on the ground or in the kitchen, is not a destination but a path. — Tamar Adler

Leo wondered what unknown sin they must have committed in some previous life to deserve this. The answer came the same way their feet later shocked to life in the warming hut after being so numb for hours- you think you'll never feel your toes again, and then all of a sudden life, damaged, stiffened, clammy, but life, dog-eat-dog life! We have not done a single thing to deserve this. — Peter Orner

You should climb around inside my brain, Dan. It's like this dark room surrounded by quicksand." "I know what you mean," her brother said quietly. "I hate being in my brain sometimes. I have to get out." "What do you do?" Amy asked. Dan shrugged "I go to other places. My toes. My shoulders. But mostly here." He tapped his chest and immediately reddened. "I know. It's stupid." "Not really," Amy said. "I wish I could do that, too. — Peter Lerangis

The truth of the matter is one knows what it's like being the president. Not I, nor any president to come hence. This is because life, thankfully, offers deeper quandaries. While in office, I would often wake up in a daze, wondering how I could wiggle my toes without even thinking it so, or why hair grows only on certain places and not our entire bodies, or why we aren't completely bald, or why we must close our eyes and sleep every night, or any of the millions of particulars of daily existence, let alone that I was elected the leader of an entire nation. — George Washington

Being sorry won't get you into heaven. Get happy, son. Get that old spring into your step and stay on your toes. — Robert A. Heinlein

I remember being infuriated from the top of my head to the tip of my toes the first time a screen was put around Bob Carter and me on a train leaving Washington in the 1940s. — Constance Baker Motley

Courage does not mean being unafraid." "True, but everyone doesn't have to know I was shaking in my boots. Literally." "I am not everyone. I still cannot believe you are real," he said softly. His lips moved against her cheek, a brush lighter than a butterfly wing, yet she felt it all the way to her toes. That small caress sent — Christine Feehan

Climbing is a full-body sport from your fingers to your toes, but at the same time, it's like a dance on the rock. It's about being strong and fit but also graceful and elegant and efficient on the rock. — Chris Sharma

You've already slept the entire day. Why not take over for Matthew now?"
"You really think I could sleep with your eyes devouring me all day?"
Her face turned red with rage and mortification. That faker! She had been staring at him at various times throughout the day. She probably had his face so memorized that she could sketch it without his being present. But he couldn't keep his knowledge of that to himself? He had to make sure she was embarrassed right down to her toes?
But he didn't rub it in further. At least,she thought he was done with the subject when he lay down on his seat and turned his back to her. "Get some sleep yourself," he ordered. "You'll need to be at your best tomorrow, too."
She was just lying down when he added, "And keep your eyes off my arse."
Waves of heat crept up to her cheeks. That pretty much guarenteed that she wasn't going to get any sleep until he was out of the coach. — Johanna Lindsey

Don't you dare be reasonable in this, Don-Dueli. Not when I want to be mad at you for the insult you just dealt."Mara
"Well, far be it from me to deprive you of anything, love. If you want to beat me arse, I'll even get naked for it. . . ." He lifted his bare leg out from beneath the covers to wiggle his toes at her. "Oh , wait, I already am." Devyl — Sherrilyn Kenyon

the government' - that's too sweeping a term. 'The government' is several million people, nearly a million in Washington alone. We have to ask ourselves: Whose toes were being stepped on? What person or persons? Not 'the government' - but what individuals? — Robert A. Heinlein

I think most people don't really understand all that it takes to stand on your toes, and to be able to jump and land without any noise, or for a male dancer to be able to lift a girl. All of these things look so effortless, but there's an attention to detail and years of training, as well as being able to transform into a character and being able to meld all of those things together. — Misty Copeland

Die in winter woods," roared Tarin, as if it were his most
fervent wish. He was losing it again. Since being caught, he
had seen a boy with no balls or toes, a finger had been in his
ass twice, he'd been cooked, made to wear clothes, walked on
winter-lake stuff, wasted his gift, was going to have his tooth
pulled out and - scat - and he was being laughed at. — Syd McGinley

This is insane, you know that, right? I think the dark power has warped your sense of what's smart and what's incredibly stupid."

"On the contrary, I'm being proactive and taking charge of things, dammit. You like it when I do that," I told Jim.

"I don't like it when you go stomping off to prove something, and we end up in seriously hot water."

"I always get you out before you actually boil."

"Not always," it answered, looking pointedly at its feet.

"Will you stop with the toes? You have enough of them left. — Katie MacAlister

I try to walk around without being noticed but I can't help attracting attention with my pink Mohawk, black clothing and steel toes, and often I'm with Holly and we're both tall and arrogant. — Jo Treggiari