Diffusing Quotes & Sayings

The Plot Against The Giant

First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl
Oh, la...le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him. — Wallace Stevens

The melodious song mesmerized me and cloaked my soul in a most liberating embrace I had never known. The emotion enveloped me, and smothered the emptiness. — J.D. Stroube

Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friend's listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up, sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms:
The ivy whines upon the wall
And whines and twines upon the wall
The ivy whines upon the wall
The yellow ivy on the wall
Ivy, ivy up the wall.
Did any one ever hear such drivel? — James Joyce

Multihued light radiated up from beneath the water, centered among the reeds, and then diffusing outward as it reached the surface. Violet had never seen anything like it, and she knew that the spectrum of light was defying its very nature by behaving in that way.
It could only be one thing.
There was something dead down there. — Kimberly Derting

There was so much force and beauty in the windows, such unsettled sadness in what little I knew of Rose's life, all her longing, her distance from her daughter. Just knowing she had existed opened new and uneasy possibilities within my understanding of the story I'd always thought I'd known by heart ... Whoever Rose had been, she was gone, unable to speak for herself, fading into the past as surely as these rainy colors were diffusing, even now [p. 142]. — Kim Edwards

At the beginning of the relationship, we need to get to know the other person to insure 1) we are compatible and 2) to determine how to start the approach and begin talks that eventually lead to a relationship. Then, when we get to know the person, we can start sharing and offering what he or she needs or wants. How do people fall in love? With little details. And that same principle applies to make customers fall in love with our brand. — Francisco J. Serrano

Anger met with anger only increases enmity rather than diffusing a tense situation. Anger, in turn, gives birth to hate. In such cases the wisest thing to do is not to engage through emotion. Emotions are self-centered and denying them spares animosity. — Donna Lynn Hope

I like the fact that everyone is nostalgic for vinyl, and I'm being nostalgic for CDs, which are like the new outdated things that no one is going to mourn the loss of - everyone's already written them off. — Alexis Taylor

The soul of a true christian, as I then wrote my meditations, appeared like such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the year; low and humble on the ground, opening its bosom
to receive the pleasant beams of the sun's glory; rejoicing, as it were, in a calm rapture; diffusing around a sweet fragrancy; standing peacefully and lovingly, in the midst of other
flowers round about; all in like manner opening their bosoms to drink in the light of the sun. — Jonathan Edwards

There, Margaret, the sun is forever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There - for with your leave, — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

I am a living member of the great family of all souls; and I cannot improve or suffer myself, without diffusing good or evil around me through an ever-enlarging sphere. I belong to this family. I am bound to it by vital bonds. — William Ellery Channing

These people are civilians, Moira. Look at them. They didn't try to hurt Holcomb's workers and they're certainly no threat to the Cabal." I smiled and waved my right hand, palm out. "Come on. You know these aren't the druids you're looking for." No one even chuckled. So much for diffusing the situation with humor. — Mercedes Lackey

To Selene (Moon)

Hear, Goddess queen, diffusing silver light, bull-horn'd and wand'ring thro' the gloom of Night.
With stars surrounded, and with circuit wide Night's torch extending, thro' the heav'ns you ride:
Female and Male with borrow'd rays you shine, and now full-orb'd, now tending to decline.
Mother of ages, fruit-producing Moon [Mene], whose amber orb makes Night's reflected noon:
Lover of horses, splendid, queen of Night, all-seeing pow'r bedeck'd with starry light.
Lover of vigilance, the foe of strife, in peace rejoicing, and a prudent life:
Fair lamp of Night, its ornament and friend, who giv'st to Nature's works their destin'd end.
Queen of the stars, all-wife Diana hail! Deck'd with a graceful robe and shining veil;
Come, blessed Goddess, prudent, starry, bright, come moony-lamp with chaste and splendid light,
Shine on these sacred rites with prosp'rous rays, and pleas'd accept thy suppliant's mystic praise. — Orpheus

It is quite simple, being nothing more than a radium generator diffusing radio-activity in all directions to a distance of a hundred yards or so from the flier. Should — Edgar Rice Burroughs

No amount of standing on hilltops on dark nights and surveying the heavens could prepare a man for the actuality of space travel, because the earthbound observer saw only the the stars, not what separated them. They glittered in his vision, filling his eyes, and he had no choice but to assign them a position of importance in the cosmic scheme. The space traveler saw things differently. He was made aware that the universe consisted of emptiness, that the suns and nebulae were almost an irrelevancy, that the stars were nothing more than a whiff of gas diffusing into infinity. And sooner or later that knowledge began to hurt. — Bob Shaw

God inducts us into the eternal kind of life that flows through himself. He does this first by bringing that life to bear upon our needs, and then by diffusing it throughout our deeds - deeds done with expectation that he and his Father will act with and in our actions. — Dallas Willard

He who seeks truth should be of no country. — Voltaire

'Referring the matter to a committee' can be a device for diluting authority, diffusing responsibility and delaying decisions. — Antony Jay

If a caddie can help you, you don't know how to play golf. — Dan Jenkins

The instructive admonitions, "give an account of thy stewardship," - "occupy till I come;" are forgotten. Thus the generous and wakeful spirit of Christian Benevolence, seeking and finding every where occasions for its exercise, is exploded, and a system of decent selfishness is avowedly established in its stead; a system scarcely more to be abjured for its impiety, than to be abhorred for its cold insensibility to the opportunities of diffusing happiness. — William Wilberforce

Private enterprise is not as spectacular nor as easy to see as the socialist way of temporarily diffusing poverty by eating up the seed corn - the tools - which will increase poverty in the long run. — Raymond C. Hoiles

I felt a sensation of candour and amplitude, of the body and mind opened up, of thought diffusing at the body's edges rather than ending at the skin. — Robert Macfarlane

It is almost always the unhappiness of a victorious disputant to destroy his own authority by claiming too many consequences, or diffusing his proposition to an indefensible extent. — Samuel Johnson

We talked about the resources that the justice department has available to help them
the technical assistance to ensure that we're diffusing situations, not encouraging them to spiral out of control. — Valerie Jarrett

The concerns of vulnerable workers and the poor, and their particular susceptibility to the ill effects of the diffusing forces operating in our society and economy, therefore need to be front and center in our economic thinking. This — Yuval Levin

The most wonderful study of mankind is man. Relieving human suffering and diffusing universal knowledge is humanitarian. — Daniel D. Palmer

Everybody certainly has the right to defend themselves. That's not to say that they should defy common sense by avoiding or diffusing confrontation. And that's very, very important. — Steven Seagal

In my own time there have been inventions of this sort, transparent windows tubes for diffusing warmth equally through all parts of a building short-hand, which has been carried to such a perfection that a writer can keep pace with the most rapid speaker. But the inventing of such things is drudgery for the lowest slaves; philosophy lies deeper. It is not her office to teach men how to use their hands. The object of her lessons is to form the soul. — Seneca The Younger

Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but don't. It exacerbates and often rewards all the other drivers of willful blindness; our preference for the familiar, our love for individuals and for big ideas, a love of busyness and our dislike of conflict and change, the human instinct to obey and conform and our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility. All of these operate and collaborate with varying intensities at different moments in our lives. The common denominator is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. In some ways, they all act like money; making us feel good at first, with consequences we don't see. We wouldn't be so blind if our blindness didn't deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease. — Margaret Heffernan

The best service that can be rendered to a Country, next to that of giving it liberty, is in diffusing the mental improvement equally essential to the preservation, and the enjoyment of the blessing. — James Madison

I like conventions. I like meeting and greeting. I'm perched on that edge where I'm getting more attention than I quite know what to do with, though. — Laurell K. Hamilton

The energies represented by the four # elements are ulitimately the fundamental realities of life that are being analysed with # astrology — Stephen Arroyo

Everything about her disarms me:her smile, her touch, her spirit.Little by little, she's diffusing the bomb that constantly ticks, the one threatening to rip me apart-and I don't even think she gets it. — Beth Michele

Often, joking for me is a way of diffusing the awkwardness of a situation, so it's kind of exhilarating to be a part of projects where there's nothing funny or lighthearted. — Emma Stone

Five things I'd rather do than swatch for my new project
1. Get a spinal tap.
2. Scrub the bathtub after all three of my daughters have come home from "Sandbox day" at the park.
3. Babysit two-year-old triplets while simultaneously diffusing a bomb.
4. Bathe a cat.
5. KNIT MY NEW PROJECT. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Rumor with her ten thousand tongues is diffusing her uncertain sounds in almost every ear.. — Joseph Smith Jr.