Bobbing Quotes & Sayings

He makes a face and tosses the flower at me. It lands on my cheek, and I pick it up and twirl it between my fingers. I could lie out here all day, not moving an inch, feeling the sun above and the grass below. With a contented sigh, I stretch my arms wide, raking the grass with my fingers - and find myself brushing Aladdin's hand with my own. I pull it away quickly, my cheeks warming. He laughs a little.
"Sometimes," he says, "I forget you're supposed to be four thousand years old. You act as shy as a girl of sixteen."
"I do not!" I sit up and glare at him.
He grins and shrugs, sliding his hands under his head. There are bits of grass stuck in his hair, and after a moment's hesitation, I reach over and flick them away.
Aladdin watches me silently, his throat bobbing as he swallows. I drop my gaze. — Jessica Khoury

The ferry master moved away to lower the bow ramp onto the sand. He'd taken three paces when he heard a loud splash behind him. He swung around to see Ergon's head bobbing to the surface next to the stern of the punt, his arms thrashing widely as the shock of the cold sea water revived him.
Crowley grinned at the ferry master. 'Thought a little swim might do him good' he said.
Ergon was already floundering his way towards the beach. He was in waist-deep water now and in no danger of growing. Sodden and spluttering, he staggered up the sand and stood, glaring at Crowley and dripping water.
'I'll kill you for that!' he snarled
Crowley raised an eyebrow. 'So you keep saying'
He snapped his fingers at the two horses and they followed him down the ramp onto the land. The ferry master watched with interest. He'd never seen a Ranger tossed overboard before- particularly by another Ranger. — John Flanagan

Hip-hop is not something we do, it's something we live. It's the way we dress, the way we talk ... everybody bobbing to the same beat. It's a culture, and you have to find your own place in that culture. Top 10 or Top 40 can't dictate that. They can only dictate what's marketable. — Erykah Badu

His jaw was clenched. His breathing became labored, like he was carrying something heavy. She watched the muscles in his throat working, Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed, hard.
Victory.
At that moment, she knew he wouldn't try to stop her. She stepped forward, raised herself up on her tiptoes, and kissed him. Softly. Then she pulled back, challenge unspoken.
Come on, Sam. Fight for me. — Isobel Irons

Two Polish men at Halloween with burned faces. What happened? They were bobbing for french fries. — Henny Youngman

Bitch, just give it to me straight: are you bobbing for this guy's bananas? Is that what this is about?" she asks. "No - no, — Laura Thalassa

Oh, it doesn't work at all. That's the problem! It's an endless, halting parade of inspections, bribes, and nonsense - but if you're aboard a Texas vessel, you'll find less inconvenience along the way."
"It's because of their guns!" declared Mr. Henderson, once more escaping his reverie, bobbing out of it as if to gasp for air.
"Concise, my love." Mrs. Henderson gave him a smile. "And correct. Texans are heavily armed and often impatient. They don't need to be transporting arms and gunpowder to create a great nuisance for anyone who stops them, so they tend to be stopped ... less often. — Cherie Priest

The solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the buildings like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars. — Tana French

He swallows, his Adam's apple bobbing on his thick neck and I briefly imagine what it's like to bite him there, just a small nibble or two. I bet he tastes like sage and testosterone. — Karina Halle

During dinner a sea turtle stopped by for a visit. At three or four feet in length... the turtle swam alongside for about twenty minutes, its head bobbing just above the surface of the water. Then with laughing eyes the turtle passed me..being left behind by a turtle pricked up my competitive nature. I pulled harder trying to keep up, but I couldn't catch the turtle. Soon I was reduced to laughter. " I am in the North Atlantic in a rowboat, racing a turtle...and loosing. Okay, so they can swim thirty miles an hour. Out here, I am the tortoise and it's the hare. — Tori Murden McClure

She smiles and slips her arm through his. Her tread is light and bouncy and I can almost see the ghost of her cheerleader's ponytail bobbing at the back of her head. — Laura Wiess

People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist really is.
An optimist is neither naive, nor blind to the facts, nor in denial of grim reality. An optimist believes in the optimal usage of all options available, no matter how limited. As such, an optimist always sees the big picture. How else to keep track of all that's out there? An optimist is simply a proactive realist.
An idealist focuses only on the best aspects of all things (sometimes in detriment to reality); an optimist strives to find an effective solution. A pessimist sees limited or no choices in dark times; an optimist makes choices.
When bobbing for apples, an idealist endlessly reaches for the best apple, a pessimist settles for the first one within reach, while an optimist drains the barrel, fishes out all the apples and makes pie.
Annoying? Yes. But, oh-so tasty! — Vera Nazarian

One day, I decided to be an island. I took off my clothes and walked into the sea, then floated there, bobbing along with the tide, suspended by my inflatable tube and water wings. — Ng Yi-Sheng

Believe me, I know all about bottle acoustics. I spent much of the sixth century in an old sesame oil jar, corked with wax, bobbing about in the Red Sea. No one heard my hollers. In the end an old fisherman set me free, by which time I was desperate enough to grant him several wishes. I erupted in the form of a smoking giant, did a few lightning bolts, and bent to ask him his desire. Poor old boy had dropped dead of a heart attack. There should be a moral there, but for the life of me I can't see one. — Jonathan Stroud

I go in on your arm and we separate. To make me look unavailable, since Vlad likes what he can't have, I play dumb blonde and make myself sexy." I glared as Adam barked with laughter at my words."No going off of the plan, when he takes you in the back room - and he will, you work the information out of him without blowing your cover, or him." I shot the glare to Ryder. "I have no intention of bobbing on Vlad's knob. Or yours." I tossed into remove the wide smirk my response had given him and it worked. — Amelia Hutchins

As I reached the highest step, I turned. Spread along the platform was a mass of bobbing black hair like a long wave of silk. Suddenly I felt the first stirrings of what I would later come to recognize as kinship, a feeling that alarmed me, a sense that I was of a piece with a group of people for the most basic reasons, simple to the senses and irrational. — Zia Haider Rahman

He swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat. Need assaulted him. In his entire life, he'd never felt desire like this. Or the desperation to touch, to hold, to own. — Jess Dee

The crowd is bobbing round him and he is part of it, the free people of the earth have taken him among them. He is one with all these grown-up happy children celebrating their independence of things that never held them. — John Le Carre

Forgive me, Mr. Addleshaw, but I don't think Miss Peabody is exactly keen about going to Arnold Constable & Company."
"Why would you say that?"
"She's dashing away in the opposite direction."
Oliver turned, and sure enough, Harriet was quickly disappearing into the crowd, her huge hat once again bobbing in the breeze. — Jen Turano

The Questioner was repacking his tools with a vague air of disappointment. Deciding my legs were steady enough to carry me, I propped myself to my feet, then turned towards my would-be torturer. 'You got a cigarette?' I asked.
He shook his head, the burned red crown of his hood bobbing. 'I don't smoke,' he said without taking his eyes off his work. 'That stuff will kill you. — Daniel Polansky

Dellarobia noted they were not a perfect physical match: Nelda plump and rosy-cheeked, her mother fine-boned. The resemblance blazed in their wide brown eyes and the way they nodded, the gnomy caps bobbing. Mother-daughter adventurers. She felt a pang of longing, as she often did in church. Everybody had a mother and a God; those were standard issue. — Barbara Kingsolver

The fabric of Lady Islay's gown certainly cost as much as Claribel's entire quarterly allowance. It was a pearly silk taffeta shot with threads of silver. Her breasts were scarcely covered, and from there the gown fell straight to the ground in a hauntingly beautiful sweep of cloth.
The pink brought out the color of her hair- burnt amber enticed with brandy and buttercup. If only she had left it free around her face and perhaps created some charming curls! Claribel made up her mind to tell her privately about the newest curling irons. She herself had lovely corkscrew curls bobbing next to her ears. — Eloisa James

I think all geniuses - or the ones thet I've run into - tend to have a faintly tenuous relationship with the real world, because so much is going on on the inside. They may be geniuses but they often need someone to walk around holding a string. They're sort of balloons, bobbing around. — Neil Gaiman

Now here was Saeed Saeed, and Biju's admiration for the man confounded him. Fate worked this way. Biju was overcome by the desire to be his friend, because Saeed Saeed wasn't drowning, he was bobbing in the tides. — Kiran Desai

In a pine tree behind me, an eagle waits out the rain, hunched into himself, brooding. Crows squabble, a murder chasing a raven. Seals cruise the lines of fishing nets bobbing in the water, hoping for an easy meal, the tender bellies of salmon. — Eden Robinson

If you think of the universe as a vast electrical sea in which you are immersed and from which you are formed, opening to your creativity changes you from something bobbing in that sea to a more fully functioning, more conscious, more cooperative part of that ecosystem. — Julia Cameron

Well, you look like something the cat dragged in," he remarked, immediately laying a hand on the warrior's forehead and closing his eyes in order to assess the damage done to the warrior's abused body.
Gideon did not understand why Elijah found his remark so terribly funny, but the warrior was laughing so hard that his nurse pinched him in the arm to stop him.
"I can't keep pressure with your chest bobbing up and down. Besides, Gideon will never be that funny," she said, giving him a cockeyed look. — Jacquelyn Frank

A warp," Nita whispered. "A tunnel through space-time. Are you a white hole?"
It stopped bobbing, stared at her as if she had said something derogatory. (Do I look like a hole?) — Diane Duane

If only feelings and ideas and stories and history really could be contained in a block of marble - if only there could be a gathering up of permanence - how reassuring it would be, how comforting to think that something you loved could be held in place, moored and everlasting, rather than bobbing along on the slippery sea of reminiscence, where it could always drift out of reach. — Susan Orlean

We wore headlamps and the sight of us bobbing up the hill or zipping perilously down it had the look of busy stars, as if the night sky had come down to join us in our play. — Benjamin Percy

Okay. The story is about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. He's enjoying the wind and the fresh air-until he notices the other waves in front of him, crashing against the shore. "My God, this is terrible," the wave says. "Look what's going to happen to me!"
Then along comes another wave. It sees the first wave, looking grim, and it says to him, "Why do you look so sad?"
The first wave says, "You don't understand! We're all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn't it terrible?"
The second wave says, "No, you don't understand. You're not a wave, you're part of the ocean. — Morrie Schwartz.

The Yellow Bear made its first appearance bobbing around on the swollen waters after the Great Flood, following which it disappeared for a while. It tended to show up in periods of unusual stress or upheaval. Even though it looked like it had been made in a factory by unskilled labourers, it had been forged in the Cradle of Civilisation and was said to be the product of a collaboration between humans and machines, lending some credence to the belief that machines had been on the planet long before humans were capable of making them. — Kathryn Davis

The life of a man is like a ball in the river, the Buddhist texts state - no matter what our will wants or desires, we are swept along by an invisible current that finally delivers us to the limitless expanse of the black sea. This image rather appeals to me. It suggests there are times when we float lightly along life's surface, bobbing from one languid, long pool to another. But then, when we least expect it, we turn a river bend and find ourselves plummeting over a thundering waterfall into the churning abyss below. This I have experienced. And more. — Richard C. Morais

No rescue boat can save the touches I left bobbing in the wild ocean of your flesh, but if they cut open your heart, like the belly of a shark, dumped its contents on a table - would there be any trace of me? — Jeffrey McDaniel

Deegan pushed once, twice, and rolled the body in. The current's fast fingers claimed Bobby and in less than two seconds he'd slipped beneath the rippling surface. About ten yards down, he bobbed up and then disappeared again. Oh, look, Bobby was bobbing. I chuckled. — Bonnie R. Paulson

Hauled up our wine-casks, and hove them overboard, tied one to the other by a long line. Then the crew took to the boats and rowed shorewards, singing as they went, and drawing after them the long bobbing procession of casks, like — Kenneth Grahame

For me, the flow of information was an apt metaphor. As surfing became my obsession at a young age, my innovation had been to remap my tactile sense into the water around me. Sitting on my surfboard, bobbing up and down between the swells, I could feel the pressure, shape, and temperature of the water's surface around me through my skin. The thousands of neurons attached to each hair follicle could sense even tiny subsurface eddies and water currents. After nearly twenty years of dedicated practice, my brain had neuroplastically reformatted to devote a large part of itself to my water-sense, and I now had the most highly attuned tactile array of any pssi-kid, or for that matter anyone else in the world. Sitting with my eyes closed, I could feel the water moving and undulating around me as a perfectly natural and integral part of my body. I was one with the water, and it was one with me. — Matthew Mather

The long drizzle had begun. Pedestrians had turned up collars and trousers at the bottom. Hands were hidden in the pockets of the umbrella-less - umbrellas were up. The street looked like a sea of round, black-cloth roofs, twisting, bobbing, moving. Trucks and vans were rattling in a noisy line, and everywhere men were shielding themselves as best they could. — Theodore Dreiser

The thing is you have to fight the whole time. You can't stop. Otherwise you just end up somewhere, bobbing in the middle of a life you never wanted. — Alexander Maksik

And no one could have known if he had ever looked at her either as, without any semblance of progress in either of them, they draw slowly together as the wagon crawls terrifically toward her in its slow palpable aura of somnolence and red dust in which the steady feet of the mules move dreamlike and punctuate by the sparse jingle of harness and the limber bobbing of jackrabbit ears, the mules still neither asleep nor awake as he halts them. — William Faulkner

He started as a maker of Cartesian devils - imps of bottle glass bobbing up and down in methylate-filled tubes hawked during Catkin Week on the boulevards. He — Vladimir Nabokov

We just got a couple of huge breaks.
You need to play it cool." She nodded, her head bobbing vigorously.
"I can be cool."
She was totally not going to be cool. — Kristen Ashley

Our bedraggled heads peeped from the water like bobbing apples just waiting to be eaten, as Magwart prowled the shore. — S.L. Mills

He examined the paper, his eyes bobbing as he counted the pieces, and sighed, shoulders slumping. "I'm going to teach you something I really shouldn't be teaching you."
"But given the circumstances," she urged.
He nodded. His lip quirked. "Given the circumstances. Just pretend to forget it once this is over . . . if either of us makes it past this. — Charlie N. Holmberg

Come on. I'll race you.
Before I can respond, she takes off toward the boardwalk. I can't believe she managed to make me feel better. I watch her run, her ponytail bobbing behind her. I know with my freakishly long legs I could easily overtake her, even with her head start. But I don't. Because that's what best friends do for each other. — Wendy Mass

What could be more general than 2, which can represent two galaxies or two pickles, or one galaxy plus one pickle (the mind doth boggle), or just 2 gently bobbing - where? It, like God, is an "I am" and many have thought that it must be a precipitate of ultimate reality. — Alfred W. Crosby

In the morn when they woke,
it was Halloween Day.
There was bobbing for apples
and rides in the hay.
There were costume parties,
and games to be played.
Cupcakes and candy and,
of course, a parade!
After dinner was served,
and the kids were done eating,
it was finally time
to go trick-or-treating!
Moms re-painted faces,
and straightened clown hats,
put wings back on fairies,
angels, and bats.
Jack-o-lanterns were set
out on porches with care.
Their grins seemed to say,
"Knock if you dare. — Natasha Wing

And so he had begun his adulthood, the last three years spent bobbing from bank to bank in a muck-bottomed pond, the trees above and around him blotting out the light, making it too dark for him to see whether the lake he was in opened up into a river or whether it was contained, its own small universe in which he might spend years, decades - his life - searching bumblingly for a way out that didn't exist, had never existed. — Hanya Yanagihara

But I would make it through "Death Valley." Lee, Thurston, and I, and then just the two of us, stood there. My about-to-be-ex husband and I faced that mass of bobbing wet Brazilians, our voices together spell-checking the old words, and for me it was a staccato soundtrack of surreal raw energy and anger and pain: Hit it. Hit it. Hit it. I don't think I had ever felt so alone in my whole life. — Kim Gordon

Resting on its back in the ocean, the otter drifts along tossed by currents so tumultuous that it disappears beneath the waves for minutes at a time before bobbing back to the surface, one tiny arm behind its neck, looking for all the world as though it should be resting a martini on its chest. This is the California waiting for us: this state, and this state of mind. — Monica Ganas

Hanna was surprised by the warmth of the chicken's feet, that were scaly and bony and should not be warm at all. She could feel her father laughing at her, as he left her to it and went into the house. Hanna held the chicken away from herself with both hands and tried not to drop the thing as it flapped in the wind and twisted over the space where its head used to be. One of the cats already had the fleshy cockscomb in its little cat's teeth, and was running away with the head bobbing under its little white chin. Hanna might have screamed at all that - at the dangling, ragged neck and the cock's outraged eye - but she was too busy keeping the corpse from jerking out of her hands. The wings were agape, the russet feathers all ruffled back and showing their yellow under-down, and the body was shitting under the black tail feathers, in squirts that mimicked the squirting blood. — Anne Enright

Cadavers' intestines hanging like a parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs ... — Mary Roach

Easy? You men have no idea what we're dealing with down there. Teeth placement, and jaw stress, and suction, and gag reflex, and all the while bobbing up and down, moaning and trying to breathe through our noses. Easy?Honey, they don't call it a job for nothin'! — Kim Cattrall

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. — Virginia Woolf

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I've got Tourette's. My mouth won't quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks of empty breath and tone. — Jonathan Lethem

In the history of the world there have been lots of onces and lots of times, and every time has had a once upon it.
Most people will tell you that the once upon a time happened in a land far, far away, but it really depends on where you are. The once upon a time may have been just outside your back door. It may have been beneath your very feet. It might not have been in a land at all but deep in the sea's belly or bobbing around on its back. — N.D. Wilson

He slept and in his sleep he saw his friends again and they were coming downriver on muddy floodwaters, Hoghead and the City Mouse and J-Bone and Bearhunter and Bucket and Boneyard and J D Davis and Earl Solomon, all watching him where he stood on the shore. They turned gently in their rubber bullboat, bobbing slightly on the broad and ropy waters, their feet impinging in the floor of the thing with membraneous yellow tracks. They glided past somberly. Out of a lightless dawn receding, past the pale daystar. A fog more obscure closed away their figures gone a sadder way by psychic seas across the Tarn of Acheron. From a rock in the river he waved them farewell but they did not wave back. — Cormac McCarthy

What's coming out of the stereo is like a genre unto itself, a charming, fucked-up fairy tale that immediately breaks my heart in all the best ways.
I stretch out on the floor with my ear parked next to the speaker, in a trance. I place the album cover over my face to block out any interruption as "I'll Be Your Mirror" seduces me. I immediately add the song to my mental list of top ten songs ever.
And as I'm bobbing my head with dreamy abandon, I hear a voice. "Nice choice, DJ," it says.
I slowly slide the album cover down past my eyes and look up. My eyes spy his shoes first
paint-splattered brogues. My heart stops when I look at his face. Pale skin, messy black hair, emerald eyes ... Senor Smolder! He's eighteen, maybe nineteen. And no, my imagination didn't lie, he is just as devastating now as he was the first time I saw him. Only even more, because he just complimented my taste in music. — Shauna Cross

The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire's bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Usually, Shakespeare gives me goose bumps. The guy knows everything. Like some ancient angel quill-ing out blueprints life. Hiding it in fiction. And usually I love the sound of the words, the way they dance on the page. Today, they fall flat. My attention bobbing in the cosmos. All free brain-space is marinating in gap month fizz. I chew my pen, candy-cane style. The million possibilities ahead make it hard to care about right now. I write my answers slowly, each letter carved in stone not ballpoint. I'm going to explore the world, find my passion, try everything! The fizz shoots up my spine and a smile sprouts. — Jolene Stockman

The water still flows swiftly, and silently, toward Boston Harbor. The water soaks the shoreline, making the summer grasses grow thick, which help feed the waterfowl, and it flows languidly, ceaselessly, under the old bridges, reflecting clouds in summer and bobbing with floes in winter - and silently heads toward the ocean. — Haruki Murakami

She remembered her hand and how to work it, tearing open his falls and the smallclothes beneath. Her breaths were coming in hot little pants now and she stared up at him as she took him into her fist. She would remember this. She'd remember this until her dying day, she promised herself.
"Ah, Eve," he groaned, his head falling back, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed. He thrust once, convulsively, into her hand, and then he was lifting and spreading her legs, taking his cock out of her hand, thrusting into her.
She gasped, it was so fast. A complete possession. — Elizabeth Hoyt

A memory flashed back at me, of his willy bobbing about while he wrestled with his briefcase - well dignity and nudity aren't often seen together. — Kate Saunders

Child, you've been trying to drown your sorrows for some time now. And the problem with that plan is, you can't drown sorrows. They're good swimmers. They're gonna float back up to the top and be bobbing right where you left them last night. — Terri Lee

The Everglades are on fire on my final drive down to the Keys. On the curve of the turnpike where the pineapple groves end and marshland begins, I watch the green horizon burn with helicopters bobbing overhead, fighting the flames. It's too late in the season to be a wildfire. The radio says some thrill-torcher is responsible.

I don't believe in omens. I believe we choose our own signs, so I take this one as my own: with this blaze, I leave my old life up here on the mainland in ashes. — Patricia Engel

COME HOME, TENAR! COME HOME!"
In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face toward home. The mother waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind her, watched the tiny figure running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass beneath the trees. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Looking down on it from the helicopter, with a bottle of Jack in my left hand, a bag of pills in my right hand, and a blond head bobbing up and doen in my lap, I felt like the king of the world. — Vince Neil

I haven't seen the film yet because I just got in from London. In the scenes where the two characters are bantering with each other, it is like bobbing at the net in tennis. — Albert Finney

I'd become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody's error in judgement. — Sam Lipsyte

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobbledstreets silent and the hunched courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. — Dylan Thomas

Umbridge. 'STOP THEM!' shrieked Umbridge, but it was too late. As the Inquisitorial Squad closed in, Fred and George kicked off from the floor, shooting fifteen feet into the air, the iron peg swinging dangerously below. Fred looked across the hall at the poltergeist bobbing on his level above the crowd. 'Give her hell from us, Peeves.' And — J.K. Rowling

Why do I keep losing, Harvey? Don't tell me God's trying to make me a better person. Don't tell me all of this is so I can be stronger. Because I'm not stronger, Harv. I'm weak. I keep getting weaker and weaker, and I keep praying and praying...' He paused and swallowed, Adam's apple bobbing in his throat. 'Why won't God answer me?'
Harvey's eyes were careful, empathetic, as if he were choosing his words thoughtfully. Finally, he said quietly, 'God has answered you, Brock. Every time. It's not always how we want, but He always hears us and He always cares. — Willowy Whisper

The stables of Versailles in December were not renowned for illumination, but Eliza could hear the gentleman's satins hissing and his linens creaking as he bowed. She made curtseying noises in return. This was answered by a short burst of scratching and rasping as the gentleman adjusted his wig. She cleared her throat. He called for a candle and got a whole silver candelabra, a chevron of flames bobbing and banking like a formation of fireflies through the ambient miasma of horse breath, manure gas and wig powder. — Neal Stephenson

Good Lord. The first person she sees is Mick Drummond, with his ancient bobbing head. Would that man never die? Was he immortal? Was he real? — Liane Moriarty

Without love, loyalty, desires, passion, courage, dignities, faith, beliefs and all the other ingredients that go into making the human soul something so elevated that only God knows its limits, we are only shells bobbing aimlessly in a calm sea of mediocrity ... And if you can figure that out, please write and explain it to me because you're a better man than I am. — Sylvester Stallone

He held his hand up to his face and licked the wound. Blood. Old-tasting and rich like the sediment of a river. He looked at Jimmy. The blood on their faces meant they were part of the same stream now, bobbing in the current, borne forward effortlessly under the slowly twirling dome of the sky. — Richard Wagamese

The plane touches down on very rough ground: its wheelbarrow wheels bounce and one set of wings rises alarmingly while the other dips. Now the Masai and the plane are converging. It's a magnificent shot: the Masai run, run, run, run; because of the optics it is dreamlike. The little plane bounces, shudders, slews and finally makes lasting contact with the ground. At exactly the right moment, as the plane comes to a halt, the Masai warriors, in a highly agitated state, reach the plane, and the camera closes on the pilot, whose face as he removes his leather flying helmet and goggles, appears just above the bobbing red ochre composition of plaited hair and fat-shone bodies. It is Mel Gibson, with a grave expression, which can't quite suppress his unruly Aussieness. — Justin Cartwright

Teddy accepts the challenge. 'It has bodies floating in it, and severed heads, bobbing up and down.' He realises that his dream doesn't sound very romantic. 'And some flowers also. — Mohammed Hanif

When we observe how some people know how to manage their experiences
their insignificant, everyday experiences
so that they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while others
and how many there are!
are driven through surging waves of destiny, the most multifarious currents of the times and the nations, and yet always remain on top, bobbing like a cork, then we are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Always, sailing up from the south, from beyond the bend in the river, were clumps of water hyacinths, dark floating islands on the dark river, bobbing over the rapids. It was as if rain and river were tearing away bush from the heart of the continent and floating it down to the ocean, incalculable miles away. But the water hyacinth was the fruit of the river alone. The tall lilaccoloured flower had appeared only a few years before, and in the local language there was no word for it. The people still called it "the new thing" or "the new thing in the river," and to them it was another enemy. Its rubbery vines and leaves formed thick tangles of vegetation that adhered to the river banks and clogged up waterways. It grew fast, faster than men could destroy it with the tools they had. The channels to the villages had to be constantly cleared. Night and day the water hyacinth floated up from the south, seeding itself as it travelled. I — V.S. Naipaul

Everton" (Francis)
Alex turned his head to view a rainbow peacock mask bobbing toward him. "Good Lord, Francis, you are replendent," he said admiringly.
The peacock stopped beside him. "Dash it, Everton, how'd you know it was me?"
You're still wearing your faux ruby ring. — Suzanne Enoch

Drowning, she clung fiercely to that small, splintered piece of mast bobbing in the ocean we call justice. There is no justice, of course, or very little of it, and counting on it as a life raft is a big mistake. — Siri Hustvedt

'Red Knot' is a film that I shot in Antarctica almost three years ago on a boat. It was a film that was improvised and it had very interesting circumstances while making the film, obviously. We were on a small boat bobbing around in Antarctica. It was a really remarkable experience. — Olivia Thirlby

If my brain were surgically divided by callosotomy tomorrow, this would create at least two independent conscious minds, both of which would be psychologically continuous with the person who is now writing this paragraph. If my linguistic abilities happened to be distributed across both hemispheres, each of these minds might remember having written this sentence. The question of whether I would land in the left hemisphere or the right doesn't make sense - being based, as it is, on the illusion that there is a self bobbing on the stream of consciousness — Sam Harris

But hearing and seeing only the bright hurry-gurdy carousel os his twirling thoughts, and the same hard little horses bobbing by on their braided rods. Here they came again. The outrage! The police! Poor Molly! Sanctimonious bastard! Call that a moral position? Up to his neck in shit! The outrage! And what about Molly ... ? — Ian McEwan

The sun was bobbing on the horizon, just peeking over. Its light shimmered on the sand behind you, making your body look like it was glowing ... like it had a kind of aura. — Lucy Christopher

Royalty pollutes people's minds, boy. honest men start bowing and bobbing just because someone's granddad was a bigger murdering bastard than theirs was. — Terry Pratchett

Feminists in Greenwich Village had begun bobbing their hair in 1912. In 1915, it was still radical. "The idea, it seems, came from Russia," the New York Times reported. "The intellectual women of that country were revolutionaries. For convenience in disguising themselves when the police trailed them, they cropped their hair."2 Holloway was something of a revolutionary, too. — Jill Lepore

The Baptists' basic theology is that if you hold someone under water long enough, he'll come around to your way of thinking. It's a ritual known as 'Bobbing for Baptists.' — A. Whitney Brown

If you're out there stressing on your pro day, then you're not going to perform well, so I plan on having a little fun. Play a little music while we're out there throwing the football, have everybody tapping their toes and bobbing their head and just go out there and make the most of the experience. — Robert Griffin III

She had been lying there, facedown in the water long before the tide had turned at 3.04 that morning. Her eyes were staring into the river, her blonde hair first fanning out, then drawing back under her head with the wash of the water, like a pulsating jellyfish. The belt of her raincoat was caught on the branches of an overhanging tree and she'd been hooked, destined to forever flap against the corner of the broken pier with outstretched arms. She wasn't going anywhere now; she was simply bobbing up and down with the rhythm of the water - and she hadn't blinked in a long while. — A.J. Waines

Knowledge of physical laws can, in some cases, give you the confidence to confront surly people. A few years ago I was having a hot-cocoa nightcap at a dessert shop in Pasadena, California. I had ordered it with whipped cream, of course. When it arrived at the table, I saw no trace of the stuff. After I told the waiter that my cocoa was plain, he asserted I couldn't see the whipped cream because it sank to the bottom. Since whipped cream has a very low density and floats on all liquids that humans consume, I offered the waiter two possible explanations: either somebody forgot to add the whipped cream to my hot cocoa or the universal laws of physics were different in his restaurant. Unconvinced, he brought over a dollop of whipped cream to test for himself. After bobbing once or twice in my cup, the whipped cream sat up straight and afloat. What better proof do you need of the universality of physical laws? — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

THE PLAQUE read HARVEY GOULD, P I. It was the middle of the day, but the blinds were closed. Inside a desktop sat flanked by three non-matching chairs, a creased, leather sofa and a bookcase full of fiction.
A middle-aged man lay back with a pair of briefs hanging around his ankles. A gorgeous, young lady was bent over him in a pair of pink panties that stretched over her pert buttocks. Her head was bobbing up and down and her long, thick black hair swished around her neck with each bob. Harvey lay motionless, moaning. — Simon Palmer

I was building my work, and it took me a long time. For a good five or six years I was just kind of bobbing around, doing everything and anything. — Guido Palau

He is looking down into the toilet bowl. He sees a bright shiny red ball, about the size of his fist, covered with blood and bobbing jauntily in the yellowed water. It throbs in time
with Ernest's pulse. It is his heart. — J. Mulrooney

Bobbing and weaving are methods and maneuvers by which we bend ethics, water down morals, and parse down values to serve our agendas. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Instead of experiencing through the physical senses, I was now bobbing behind the body like a buoy at sea, cut loose from sensory solidity, separated from and witnessing the body from a vast distance. — Suzanne Segal

Once he became president, George [H.] Bush revealed a vein of Styrofoam and no matter how deep he tried to go, he always ended up bobbing on the surface. His inaugural speech was like being present at the death of language ... — Kate Clinton

At the Sound of the Gunshot,
Leave A Message

That's what my friend spoke
into his grim machine the winter he first went mad
as we both did in our thirties with still
no hope of revenue, gravely inking
our poems on pages held fast by gyres
the color of lead.

Godless, our minds
did monster us, left us bobbing as in a swamp
until we sank. His eyes were burn holes
in a swollen face. His breath was a venom
he drank deep of. He called his own tongue
a scar, this poet

who can crowbar open
the most sealed heart, make ash flower,
and the cocked shotgun's double-zero mouths
(whose pellets had exploded star holes into plaster and porcelain
and not a few locked doors) never touched
my friend's throat. Praise

Him, whose earth is green.

(for Franz Wright) — Mary Karr

The process of rating players can be compared to the measurement of the position of a cork bobbing up and down on the surface of agitated water with a yard stick tied to a rope and which is swaying in the wind. — Arpad Elo