Distaff Quotes & Sayings

A congeries of motives prevents us from blowing up our spinning mills and reviving the distaff. Gandhi had a try at this sort of revolution: he was as simple-minded as a child trying to empty the sea on to the sand with the aid of a tea-cup. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Behind every successful person, stands a very successful mother-in-law. — Lou Holtz

I like the smell of toast. Coffee is okay, but I don't drink much coffee. But toast is a nice smell. You smell some toast coming from your kitchen in the morning, you know that you're involved in a domestic situation and the operation that's going on is pleasant. — Robert Duvall

Make me, o lord, thy spinning wheel complete, thy holy word thy distaff make for me. — Edward Taylor

And so,' smiled the Witcher, 'I have no choice? I have to enter into a pact with you, a pact which should someday become the subject of a painting, and become a sorcerer? Give me a break. I know a little about the theory of heredity. My father, as I discovered with no little difficulty, was a wanderer, a churl, a troublemaker and a swashbuckler. My genes on the spear side may be dominant over the genes on the distaff side. The fact that I can swash a buckler pretty well seems to confirm that. — Andrzej Sapkowski

(Those women whom the distaff
no longer claims
nor spun cloth)
driven made,
mad,
mad
by Bacchus. — Hilda Doolittle

Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, she had handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favors here, of contumely there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the same captious alteration of caresses and blows that we endure now. — Thomas Hardy

A dog-it was a dog I saw for certain. Or thought I saw. It was snowing pretty hard by then, and you can see things in the snow that aren't there, or aren't exactly there, so that by God when you do see something, you react anyhow, erring on the distaff side, if you get my drift. That's my training as a driver, but it's also my temperament as a mother of two grown sons and wife to an invalid, and that way when I'm wrong at least I'm wrong on the side of the angels. — Russell Banks

The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me. — W.B.Yeats

A good fisherman can secure many regenerative hours in winter, polishing up the rods and reels. — Herbert Hoover

I do. I feel wonderful. Are you sure it's Carol Mardus?" "Yes. Certainly. It shouldn't have taken me so long." "Who and what is she?" "She got Dick started. She was a reader at Distaff, and she got Manny Upton to take Dick's stories. Then later he made her fiction editor. She is now." "Fiction editor of Distaff?" "Yes." "She wasn't on your list." "No, I didn't think of her. I've only seen her two or three times." "C-A-R-O-L? M-A-R-D-I-S?" "U-S." "Married?" "No. As far as I know. She was married to Willis Krug, and divorced. — Rex Stout

If have got my spindle and my distaff ready
my pen and mind
never doubting for an instant that God will send me flax. — J.G. Holland

A disturbing novel about dreams and wishes, a nightmarish distaff monkey's paw of a book that it's impossible to forget. Lisa Tuttle remains our preeminent chronicler of family madness and desire. — Neil Gaiman

This pious practice, by which the Blessed Virgin Mary is honored and the Christian people enriched with spiritual gifts, gladdens and consoles us. Mary remains ever the path that leads to Christ. Every encounter with her can only result in an encounter with Christ himself — Pope Paul VI

A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell. Thomas Fuller — Jessica Shirvington

There is little that separates humans from other sentient beings - we all feel joy, we all deeply crave to be alive and to live freely, and we all share this planet together. — Mahatma Gandhi

He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus. — Cormac McCarthy

When women are seen with pen in hand, they are met immediately with shrieks commanding a return to that life of pain which their writing had interrupted, a life devoted to the women's work of needle and distaff. — Arcangela Tarabotti

Threads that drift alone will sometimes simply twine themselves together, without need for spindle or distaff: brought into each other's ambit, they bind themselves tight with the force of their own torsion. And this same torsion can, in the course of things, bundle the resulting cord back upon itself, ravelling it up into a skein, returning to the point of its beginning. — Jo Baker

As Australians, we must not leave our children worse off. That's not fair. That is not our way. — Joe Hockey

There are thousands of wines
that can take over our minds.
Don't think all ecstasies
are the same!
Jesus was lost in his love for God.
His donkey was drunk with barley. — Rumi

Thinking that morality is all about commandments is a relatively new way of thinking, since the Reformation. — Timothy Radcliffe

He lifted the slice of cake and bit into it and turned the page. The old musty album with its foxed and crumbling paper seemed to breathe a reek of the vault, turning up one by one these dead faces with their wan and loveless gaze out toward the spinning world, masks of incertitude before the cold glass eye of the camera or recoiling before this celluloid immortality or faces simply staggered into gaga by the sheer velocity of time. Old distaff kin coughed up out of the vortex, thin and cracked and macled and a bit redundant. The landscapes, old backdrops, redundant too, recurring unchanged as if they inhabited another medium than the dry pilgrims shored up on them. Blind moil in the earth's nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races. — Cormac McCarthy

Go let thy less than woman's hand Assume the distaff not the brand. — Lord Byron

The muffled drum's sad roll has beat; The soldier's last tattoo; No more on Life's parade shall meet; The brave and fallen few. On Fame's eternal camping-ground; Their silent tents are spread, And Glory guards, with solemn round; The bivouac of the dead. — Theodore O'Hara

Blessed is that man who knows his own distaff and has found his own spindle. — J.G. Holland

It's frustrating when our best efforts to help people fail. But if we could see life through their weary eyes and experience their trials with the same frayed emotions, we might understand why. — Richelle E. Goodrich