Flabby Quotes & Sayings

Being a woman is worse than being a farmer there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturised, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised.
The whole performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to go to seed. Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature - with a full beard and handlebar moustache on each shin Dennis Healey eyebrows face a graveyard of dead skin cells spots erupting long curly fingernails like Struwelpeter blind as bat and stupid runt of species as no contact lenses flabby body flobbering around. Ugh ugh. Is it any wonder girls have no confidence? — Helen Fielding

It is more worthy in the eyes of God ... if a writer makes three pages sharp and funny about the lives of geese than to make three hundred fat and flabby about God or the American people. — Garrison Keillor

The reason some younger women were willing to go out with my flabby, ageing self was that no one of their own age would put up with them for more than 10 minutes. — Mark Barrowcliffe

We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good ... It seems long ago now, that excitement which swept through the country, or at least the intellectual reaches of it, that feeling that America was going to change, that the government had been handed down from the tired, flabby chamber-of-commerce mentality of the Eisenhower years to the best and brightest of a generation. — David Halberstam

I've seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men - men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther. — Joseph Conrad

There was a moment's suspense while Conscience and Sheer Wickedness fought the matter out inside him, and then Conscience, which had started on the encounter without enthusiasm, being obviously flabby and out of condition, threw up the sponge. — P.G. Wodehouse

I am fat and flabby and that Dr. J. I. Packer is right when he says, "Here then is the root cause of our moral flabbiness; we have neglected God's Law."3 — Alistair Begg

Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character. — Oscar Levant

When choosing the names of the seven dwarfs for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney's first full-length cartoon, over 50 names were considered. Before he settled on Dopey, Grumpy, Doc, Bashful, Sleepy, Sneezy and Happy, it is possible they might have been any from a list which included: Awful, Blabby, Burpy, Chesty, Cranky, Dippy, Dirty, Flabby, Gabby, Gloomy, Hotsy, Puffy, Sniffy, Scrappy, Shifty, Sleazy, Tipsy, Weepy, Wistful, and Woeful. ========== — Anonymous

I tell myself that after four children my belly is already so stretched and flabby that I have to do origami to get my pants buttoned. One more pregnancy and I'd be doomed to elastic waists for the rest of my life. — Ayelet Waldman

The summer colours have been drained from their bodies, and they've grown pale and flabby again. — Audur Ava Olafsdottir

My life had a tendency to spread, get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of a baroque mirror, which came from following the line of least resistance. I wanted my death, by contrast, to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a Quaker church or the basic black dress with a single strand of pearls ... — Margaret Atwood

...man becomes a soft, flabby, weak creature. This is especially true in a privileged society like that found in the United States, where a metrosexual will squeal like a little bitch if the Vietnamese lady giving him his manicure cuts too close to his cuticle. Not only will such a pathetic creature be unable to stand even the mildest rite of passage, but if he even witnesses one, he will have to undergo years of therapy to cure his posttraumatic stress. — Dave Nichols

This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the 'creative temperament' - it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No - Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what — F Scott Fitzgerald

We have a flabby public opinion which would wring its hands in anguish if we took the labor leader by the scruff of his neck, backed him up against a wall, and filled him with lead. Countries which consider themselves every bit as civilized as we do not hesitate about such matters for a moment. Whenever — Upton Sinclair

I gazed into the mirror ... There, staring at me, was the pallid, flabby-mouthed face of a crook — Sefton Delmer

The Christian's instincts of trust and worship are stimulated very powerfully by knowledge of the greatness of God. But this is knowledge which Christians today largely lack: and that is one reason why our faith is so feeble and our worship so flabby ... When a person in the church, let alone the person in the street, uses the word God, the thought is rarely of divine majesty. — J.I. Packer

For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously. — Jean-Paul Sartre

When a fat person goes in the water naked, would it still be called skinny-dipping? — Anthony Liccione

Then he noticed a little row-boat at about two hundred yards from the shore. There were two or three people aboard, he could not quite make out how many, and they were no doubt fishing, and Merritt (who disliked fish) wondered how people could spoil such an afternoon, such a sea, such pellucid and radiant air by trying to catch white, flabby, offensive, evil-smelling creatures that would be excessively nasty when cooked. — Arthur Machen

I've always known that I was a gifted person ... I've always felt like I would be punished, severely, if I didn't continue to make use of that gift. It's very important that you don't let the muscle get flabby. It's really hard, as an old human being, to press as much weight as you pressed when you were a kid. — Merle Haggard

Over time, big industries tend to get flabby and uncreative and risk-averse - and if the right outsider company has the means and creativity to come at the industry with a fresh perspective and rethink the whole thing, there's often a huge opportunity there. — Tim Urban

I devoured hot-dogs in Baltimore 'way back in 1886, and they were then very far from newfangled ... They contained precisely the same rubber, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby, puerile mustard. Their single point of difference lay in the fact that their covers were honest German Wecke made of wheat-flour baked to crispiness, and not the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster-of-Paris, flecks of bath-sponge, and atmospheric air all compact. — H.L. Mencken

The fact is that Superman should be fat. He should be a lard-assed superhero with flabby arms, a beer gut, and soft muscles.
...when Superman bench-presses a Cadillac, he doesn't even break a sweat. It's like picking up a bag of feathers. Would Batman be buff if he bench-pressed feathers? Because that's essentially what Superman does every day. — Weston Ochse

m a butterfly!" screamed the fat man as he ran, flapping his arms like two really flabby, really rubbish wings. "You're actually not," Valkyrie Cain told him for the eighth time. He ran around her in a big circle, bathed in moonlight, and she just stood there with her head down. He wasn't wearing a shirt, and moments earlier she'd had to drag her eyes away from his wobbling bosoms before they made her feel queasy. Now that his trousers were starting their inexorable slide downwards, she was averting her gaze altogether. "Please," she said, "pull up your trousers. — Derek Landy

If all who love one another were of the same opinion, living would be monotonous, and conversation flabby. So cheer up. You are content. All me to be. — Mildred Aldrich

The ideal time for writing a [television] script is four days, though sometimes it has to be two or three days depending on the deadline. If it's two days, sometimes there are things I see that don't work as well. If I have two weeks, the scripts get kind of flabby and lack the adrenaline that a sense of deadline fills you with. — David E. Kelley

Cold liquid splashing across his face brought Kevin Temple back to himself. He'd been on the road all night, a dedicated run from Indiana hauling a load of fresh vegetables. Fifteen minutes out of the depot in Cleveland, and he had that stale feel, too much coffee washing down too much beef jerky. What he'd really been craving was a double cheeseburger, but while it would surprise no one to see a trucker gone flabby around — Marcus Sakey

Under the leadership of religious professionals, modern worship has become passive - listening to a message and singing some songs. Seldom is there a call to service or an invitation to trust Christ. Baptisms take place inside the church where it is safe and comfortable rather than in public where there is opportunity to give witness to the saving grace of Christ. The great needs of society are left to para-church groups, government agencies, and other social service organizations. All the while the church is losing its muscle tone, its biceps are becoming loose and flabby and its belly is becoming round and soft. Not a pretty picture for one who once was toned and buff - a lean, mean fighting machine. — Craig Olson

George: [On the 'Two Virgins' cover]
'What I thought of the sleeve then was the same as I think now: it's just two not-very-nice-looking bodies, two flabby bodies naked. It's harmless, really - different strokes for different folks. — George Harrison

Realized that this country has gone so flabby that any gang daring enough and unscrupulous enough, and smart enough not to seem illegal, can grab hold of the entire government and have all the power and applause and salutes, all the money and palaces and willin' women they want. — Sinclair Lewis

I'm wondering why I thought it was a good idea to fill my purse with eggs."
He blinked at me.
I pulled a cold, flabby fried egg from mny bag, followed by its twin, holding them up so he could see. "Eggs."
"You couldn't carry a packet of peanuts like a normal person?" he asked.
I smiled. "I've never done normal particularly well ... — Katie MacAlister

How come pleasure never makes it on to ... a dutiful list of do's and don'ts? Doesn't joy also get soft and flabby if you neglect to exercise it? — Ellen Goodman

Then Siddhartha had spent the night at his house with dancers and wine, had pretended to be superior to his companions, which he no longer was. He had drunk much wine and later after midnight he went to bed, tired and yet agitated, nearly in tears and in despair. In vain did he try to sleep. His heart was so full of misery, he felt he could no longer endure it. He was full of nausea which overpowered him like a distasteful wine, or music that was too sweet and superficial, or like the too sweet smile of the dancers or the too sweet perfume of their hair and breasts. But above all he was nauseated with himself, with his perfumed hair, with the smell of the wine from his mouth, with the soft, flabby appearance of his skin. — Hermann Hesse

Perhaps it was the flabby stink of seared flesh that was making me feel peculiar; that, and the smoke from the candles on the tables and the borborygmic blarings of the three-piece band. — John Banville

Over the years, Leila had come to believe that politicians were literally made of special stuff, chemically different stuff. The senator was flabby and bad-haired and acne-scarred and yet completely magnetic. — Jonathan Franzen

You've got to appeal to the pride in people. When a woman is flabby and soft, she's unattractive. When you married a beautiful girl and all of a sudden you start seeing her tits down and her breath stinks and she's not clean anymore and has no pride in herself, you can't love her. You may bullshit yourself, but you can't. Energy makes people beautiful. That's what charisma is. — Jack LaLanne

Normally my run leaves me feeling like nothing but long muscles streaming with strength able and beckoning for more, anything, bring it on. That feeling is what gets me through my shift. Today the strength is nowhere. I'm lurching like a flabby first-timer; my legs drag like they're wrapped in wet sandbags, my arms flop and my breathing can't find a rhythm. I push harder, till my chest feels like it's ripping and a thick red seethes up over my eyes. I hang on to a lamppost, doubled over, waiting for it to clear. — Tana French

All of the designers I have met up to this point have been very nice, although upon being introduced to Karl Lagerfeld, he looks me up and down and dismisses me with the not super-kind, "What can you write that hasn't been written already?"
He's absolutely right, I have no idea. I can but try. The only thing I can come up with right now is that Lagerfeld's powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn't ... seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin over-risen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, overfed, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How's that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L.?
— David Rakoff

Pepper woke up thinking of butts.
And nothing else.
Ladies' butts.
Skinny butts, big butts, saddlebag butts, flabby and firm butts, the kind that sit so high they seem like part of the woman's back, the kind that ride low and form a UU just above the thighs like in the old television commercials for Hanes Underalls, butts that wiggle and butts that jiggle, sagging butts and robust butts, butts that hardly make an impression under a pair of jeans; sidewinder butts and trumpet butts
the ones so meaty they actually spread out until they appear to be a woman's thighs (ass so fat you can see it from the front), butts as knotty as acorns, butts as smooth as a slice of Gouda, butts with pimples and butts with cellulite, the kind that have pockmarks or red splotches, butts with tattoos and butts with bullet scars. Butts you can cup in your warm hands. Butts and butts and butts.
In other words, Pepper woke up horny. — Victor LaValle

But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates. That gesture, for instance, the red hand picking up the cards and fumbling: it is all flabby. It would have to be ripped apart and tailored inside. — Jean-Paul Sartre

People don't work in factories, [they aren't] big muscular guys. The working class is flabby because they're sitting in front of a computer all day, but it's still their labor being extracted. — Eric Drooker

Perhaps the sad and empty language that today's flabby humanity pours forth, will, in all its horror, in all its boundless absurdity, re-echo in the heart of a solitary man who is awake, and then perhaps that man, suddenly realizing that he does not understand, will begin to understand. — Arthur Adamov

God save the Queen and a fascist regime ... a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire — William S. Burroughs

Focus on your problem zones, your strength, your energy, your flexibility and all the rest. Maybe your chest is flabby or your hips or waist need toning. Also, you should change your program every thirty days. That's the key. — Jack LaLanne

And is not all of life material- based on the material- permeated by the material? Should not one learn, gladly, to utilize the beauty of the fine material? I do not speak of the gross crudities of soporific television, of loud brash convertibles and vulgar display- but rather of grace and line and refinement- and there are wonderful and exciting things that only money can buy, such as theater tickets, books, paintings, travel, lovely clothes- and why deny them when one can have them? The only problem is to work, to stay awake mentally and physically, and NEVER become mentally, physically, spiritually flabby or over complacent! — Elizabeth Winder

Think of a flabby person covered with layers of fat. That is what your mind can become - flabby, covered with layers of fat till it becomes too dull and lazy to think, to observe, to explore, to discover ... not wanting to be disturbed or questioned into wakefulness. — Anthony De Mello

Instantly Pandora nudged her chair with the back of her leg, toppling it over. "Blast," she exclaimed. "How did that happen?"
The countess turned to face her. "Pandora, that word!"
"What should I say when I knock something over?"
There was a brief silence as Lady Berwick considered the question. "You may say 'alas.'"
"'Alas?' Pandora echoed in distaste. "But that's such a flabby word."
"What does it even mean?" Cassandra asked. — Lisa Kleypas

The industrial and technological revolutions have made our lives simpler, in terms of what is physically required of us on a daily basis, but they have also made it possible for us to do a whole lot less than we ought to be doing, and we suffer for it.

We have become flabby and overweight; our joints and muscles have become stiff from lack of use. We suffer from all sorts of problems related to our lack of physical exercise; it affects us on all levels, causing high blood pressure, increased cholesterol, anxiety, depression, insomnia and the list goes on and on.

We know, too, how much better we feel for a bit of exercise. Those "feel-good" hormones lift our spirits, boost self-esteem and improve our overall sense of well-being. It's a sort of built-in reward system. There's a reason for that. It's because we are meant to be active. — Liberty Forrest

Thankfully you tune the strings of your moldering lyre to a moderated, to a passably joyful, nay, to an even delighted psalm of thanksgiving and with it bore your quiet, flabby and slightly stupefied half-and-half god of contentment; and in the thick warm air of a contented boredom and very welcome painlessness the nodding mandarin of a half-and-half god and the nodding middle-aged gentleman who sings his muffled psalm look as like each other as two peas. — Hermann Hesse

Cultivate will power, that massive creative force that God the creator built into you. Do not let it remain flabby but strengthen it by use and exercise. — Norman Vincent Peale

The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments, that taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft her mizzen-mast. — Joseph Conrad

He had not done any strenuous walking for a long time, and the reflection looked rather flabby, — J.R.R. Tolkien

I suppose the artists invented the firm breasts they put on women, and that in reality all women had flabby ones. — Jean Cocteau

They were conscientious, you couldn't deny it, and they were also flabby, heartless sons-of-bitches. In other words, they were well chosen, as mindlessly enthusiastic as any employer could dream of. Sons that would have delighted my mother, worshiping their bosses, if only she could have had one all to herself, a son she could have been proud of in the eyes of the world, a real legitimate son. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

One of the flabby lines you hear sometimes is, 'Speak truth to power'. Power knows the truth. It's speaking the truth to yourself that's the challenge. — Barry Sanders

The novel, he was saying, was a flabby old whore.
A flabby old whore! the older man said looking delighted.
She was serviceable, roomy, warm and familiar, the younger was saying, but really a bit used up, really a bit too slack and loose.
Slack and loose! the older said laughing.
Whereas the short story, by comparison, was a nimble goddess, a slim nymph. Because so few people had mastered the short story she was still in very good shape.
... I idly wondered how many of the books in my house were fuckable and how good they'd be in bed. — Ali Smith

APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom. The flabby wine-skin of his brain Yields to some pathologic strain, And voids from its unstored abysm The driblet of an aphorism. "The Mad Philosopher," 1697 — Ambrose Bierce

The simple life which blandly ignores all care and conflict, soon becomes flabby and invertebrate, sentimental and gelatinous. — Henry Van Dyke

If you want to know if your brain is flabby, feel your legs. — Bruce Barton

Whether you're making love to the ladies or postulating the infinite, you'll still get all flabby one day! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Overcooked, flabby pasta or a blob of tomato ketchup was enough to incense Frank; a plate of soggy pasta in Matteo's Italian restaurant in Los Angeles, owned by his childhood buddy, Matty Jordan, had Frank storming into the kitchens. He looked around wildly, "Where are all the Italians?" he roared at the startled Filipino kitchen staff. Not content, he shot back upstairs and threw his plate of pasta against the wall. As he walked out, he dipped his finger in the tomato sauce and signed the smear: Picasso (Matty very good-naturedly put a frame around this later). — Fiona Ross

I have flabby thighs, but fortunately my stomach covers them. — Joan Rivers

Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.
Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond - James Bond - you best spent your free time finger painting or playing shuffeboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed potato way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began - with a wheeze. — Marisha Pessl

White Fang received the nursing. Judge Scott's suggestion of a trained nurse was indignantly clamoured down by the girls, who themselves undertook the task. And White Fang won out on the one chance in ten thousand denied him by the surgeon. The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgement. All his life he had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilization, who live sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations. Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life without any strength in their grip. White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none. In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them. A constitution of iron and vitality of the Wild were White Fang's inheritance, and he clung to life, the whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures. — Jack London

Really hairy backs on men turn me off. I'm not into the ape thing at all. Or beer bellies and flabby arms, either. Also, one random nose hair which is longer than the others ... that's gross. — Nadine Velazquez

That one won't crack, though, Mendel decided with approval; one of your flabby oak trees, Smiley was. Think you could blow him over with one puff, but when it comes to the storm he's the only one left standing at the end of it. — John Le Carre

Lord save us from off-handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, ossified, three-karat Christianity. — Billy Sunday

[Richard Avedon's] camera dwells on the horrible things that age can do to people's faces - on the flabby flesh, the slack skin, the ugly growths, the puffy eyes, the knotted necks, the aimless wrinkles, the fearful and anxious set of the mouth, the marks left by sickness, madness, alcoholism, and irreversible disappointment. — Janet Malcolm

Only I look too soft and flabby — Onew

That was how his pen finally designed his sculpture; in the center the weak,
confused, arrogant, soon to be destroyed young man holding cup a loft, behind him the idyllic child, clear-eyed, munching his grapes, symbol of joy
; between them the tiger skin. The Bacchus, hollow within himself, flabby, reeling, already old; the Satyr,
eternally young and gay, symbol of man's childhood and naughty innocence — Irving Stone

In his left hand he was holding aloft the German flag; with his right he was shaking hands in smiling effusion with a bald-headed man whose face looked like a pot of lard that has boiled over and eventually congealed in white, flabby, unhealthy drifts and folds. — H.E. Bates

It was starting to rain, big sloppy drops spilling onto the windshield. No thunder yet. His driving was stymied by a clobbering sensation of loss. But what exactly had he lost? Himself as he had been, firm-bodied and flabby-minded? Some clarity of vision he once had possessed? Or was it the old, dormant chamber of his bicameral mind calling out to him, reminding him of the days when rocks and trees and statues had spoken with the voices of gods? — Jennifer Egan

As three unwavering bands of light, we were simple and separate and beautiful. As
machines, we were flabby bags of ancient plumbing and wiring, of rusty hinges and
feeble springs. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

As we become more skillful we also discover that concentration has its own seasons. Sometimes we sit and settle easily. At other times the conditions of mind and body are turbulent or tense. We can learn to navigate all these waters. When conditions show the mind is tight, we learn to soften and relax, to open the attention. When the mind is sleepy or flabby, we learn to sit up and focus with more energy. The Buddha compared this with the tuning of a lute, sensing when we are out of tune and gently strengthening or loosening our energy to come into balance. In — Jack Kornfield

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives. — Vladimir Nabokov

Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair-
hanging like an oasis on his air
of lost connections ... — Robert Lowell

Mental nausea of daily squash
flabby cauliflower
and grease dripping slick and sheepish
onto the placid plate of mind. — Sylvia Plath

Existentialism is a 'movement' which like all such movements has a flabby periphery and a hard center. That center is the thought of Heidegger. — Leo Strauss

'Brave' is one of those words that has been bleached of most of its meaning these days, thanks to far too many appearances in the glaring light of ad slogans and corporate public relations. I never thought about anything as brave anymore; it just seemed like a flabby, glib cliche. — Susan Orlean

We ought not to confine ourselves either to writing or to reading; the one, continuous writing, will cast a gloom over our strength, and exhaust it; the other will make our strength flabby and watery. It is better to have recourse to them alternately, and to blend one with the other, so that the fruits of one's reading may be reduced to concrete form by the pen. — Seneca The Younger

He is a squat, balding, flabby man, but still a man. He does not judge me. — Margaret Atwood

Folding the laundry, completing another project at work, or watching television for the next hour doesn't build your writing muscles. It only leaves them flabby. — Rob Bignell, Editor

land as much as anyone owned it. What did it matter if a few flabby — E. M. Forster

Moderate exercise every day will impart strength to the muscles, which without exercise become flabby and enfeebled. — Ellen G. White

The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation ... God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The spirit desires to wrestle with flesh which is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear. — Nikos Kazantzakis

For which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which — F Scott Fitzgerald

He thought of the virtues of courage and forbearance, which become flabby when there is nothing to use them on. — John Steinbeck