Drop Ceiling Quotes & Sayings

She moved suddenly, planting her hands against the kitchen floor. Throwing back her head, she screamed, and that sound was full of sorrow and heartbreak. It started as a low tremble under my feet and then increased, shaking the kitchen table and rattling the plates and cups in the cabinets. Then it was a rumble, causing the house to groan and small clouds of dust to drop from the ceiling. The table scuttled over the floor. A chair toppled over and then another. Somewhere in the living room, a window shattered. Kat was going to bring the house down. Shit. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

I practiced saying I was gay to inanimate objects around the house. I told the soap dish in the bathroom, the ceiling fan above my bed, the blue drinking glass I favored above all the others simply because over the years its entire family had perished one by one during various interactions with hard surfaces around the kitchen and I'd convinced myself our solitude was linked.
"I'm gay," I told these things. "I'm a homo."
I would wait for the orphaned drinking glass to shatter, the ceiling fan to drop, or for the soap dish to let out a bloodcurdling scream. But nothing ever happened. The world went on as ever. — Nick Burd

You play beautifully," she told him, although the music was obscurely classical and, because there were no lyrics, unmemorable to her. But the compliment was like a drop of water on the dry wool of his face. His cheeks seemed to soften, color, even swell. "I hope it doesn't disturb you," he said. She held out her hand, the thin string of the bakery box looped around her wrist. "Not at all," she said, although three or four times now she had hung on her husband's arm to keep him from banging the broom handle against the ceiling. "We enjoy it," she said. And then, at a loss for a more substantial compliment, she added, "You must have some beautiful piano. — Alice McDermott

I began reading Harper Lee's novel in the skimpy shade of a pine outside my grandmother's house, fat beagles pressing against me, begging for attention, ignored. At dark, I kept reading, first on the couch, a bologna sandwich in one hand, then in my bed, by the light of a 60-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling on an orange drop cord. When my mother came in from her job as a maid and unplugged my chandelier, I replayed the story in my head until it was crowded out by dreams. I woke the next morning, smelling biscuits, and reached for the book again. — Rick Bragg

Chickens are soaked in baths of chlorine to remove slime and odor. Mixtures of excrement, blood, oil, grease, rust, paint, insecticides, and rodent droppings accumulate in processing plants. Maggots and other larvae breed in storage and transportation containers, on the floor, and in processing equipment and packaging, and they drop onto the conveyor belt from infested meat splattered on the ceiling. — Steve Striffler

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep
all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with. — Aravind Adiga

There - the chandelier, choked with dust and webs. A single rivulet of red had trickled from the ceiling, down the central column, and out along a curving crystal arm. At its lowest point, a new pendant of blood was slowly building.
'It - it can't do that,' I stammered. 'We're inside the iron.'
'Move out of the way!' Lockwood pushed me back just as the drop fell, spattering on the floor in the center of the circle. We were all standing almost atop the iron chains. 'We've made it too big,' he said. 'The power of the iron doesn't extend into the very center. It's weak there, and this Visitor's strong enough to overcome it.'
'Adjust the chains inward-' George began.
'If we make the circle smaller,' Lockwood said, 'we'll be squeezed in a tiny space. It's scarcely midnight; we've seven hours till dawn and this thing's just gotten started. No, we've got to break out — Jonathan Stroud

When Lary called to say that the story would be published, I was so elated that I picked up my son, now a toddler, and tossed him so far into the air that his head hit the kitchen ceiling. Luckily, it was one of those drop ceilings with the foam-backed pads, so Jared didn't hurt his head. It just disappeared for a second and then came back into view. — Wally Lamb

Rather than sleeping myself, I practiced. I practiced taking everything I'd seen in the last few days-every horror, every drop of blood-and locking it away, so deep in my mind that I could pretend that nothing had happened.
And then I practiced letting it out.
This time, I didn't start with a specific memory. I didn't walk myself step by step through a scene. Instead, I built a room inside my head-a tiny room with white walls and no windows and no doors. No way out.
In that room, I put the sound of screams, tearing flesh, and heavy breathing, the smell of rancid blood. Everything I'd been holding back, everything threatening to devour me whole was there-in the ceiling of that room, the corners, the floor. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I'm standing by the cereal, reaching for a box of Honey Nut Cheerios, when I feel my chest clenching but not unclenching. It clenches tighter and tighter, like someone has wrapped a corset around it. My palms are wet. My head is compressing, growing and shrinking at the same time. I can hear my breathing, and it's so amplified that, to my own ears, I sound like Darth Vader. A woman at the end of the aisle is frozen as she watches me. She looks scared...My breathing is getting louder, and I cover my ears to block it out. And that's when the ceiling starts to spin and the air disappears and my lungs won't stop working and I can't breathe at all. I drop everything and run away from the cart and all that food until I'm out the door. I stand in the parking lot, bent over at the waist, breathing in the fresh night air, and then I lie flat on the ground, as if this will open my lungs wider and make them work again, only the breath won't come. — Jennifer Niven

One looks down from the Brooklyn Bridge on a spot of foam or a little lake of gasoline or a broken splinter or an empty scow; the world goes by upside down with pain and light devouring the innards, the sides of flesh bursting, the spears pressing in against the cartilage, the very armature of the body floating off into nothingness ... One walks the street at night with the bridge against the sky like a harp and the festered eyes of sleep burn into the shanties, deflower the walls; the stairs collapse in a smudge and the rats scamper across the ceiling; a voice is nailed against the door and long creepy things with furry antennae and thousand legs drop from the pipes like beads of sweat. — Henry Miller

In the event of a cabin failure, oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling, and untangling them will annoy you before you die. — Frankie Boyle

Then it was a rumble, causing the house to groan and small clouds of dust to drop from the ceiling. The table scuttled over the floor. A chair toppled over and then another. Somewhere in the living room, a window shattered. Kat was going to bring the house down. — Jennifer L. Armentrout