Flaps Quotes & Sayings

I'm sorry I started all this by trying to fly and I'd take it back if I could but I can't, so please think of it from my point of view: if you die I will have a dead brother and it will be me instead of you who suffers.
Justin thought of his brother on that warm summer day, standing up on the windowsill holding both their futures, light and changeable as air, in his outstretched arms.
Of course, Justin thought, I'm part of his fate just as he's part of mine. I hadn't considered it from his point of view. Or from the point of view of the universe, either. It's just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second. A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and my brother in Luton thinks he can fly.
The child nodded. A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen. — Meg Rosoff

You might be a redneck if your kids are going hungry tonight because you just had to have those Yosemite Sam mud flaps. — Jeff Foxworthy

You may not see it now," said the Princess of Pure Reason, looking knowingly at Milo's puzzled face, "but whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way. Why, when a housefly flaps his wings, a breeze goes round the world; when a speck of dust falls to the ground, the entire planet weighs a little more; and when you stamp your foot, the earth moves slightly off its course. Whenever you laugh, gladness spreads like the ripples in the pond; and whenever you're sad, no one anywhere can be really happy. And it's much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer. — Norton Juster

He was close enough so that I could see his face clearly, even with his helmet's cheek flaps tied tightly under his bearded chin. I looked into the eyes of Hector, prince of Troy. Brown eyes they were, the colour of rich farm soil, calm and deep. No anger, no battle lust. He was a cool and calculating warrior, a thinker among these hordes of wild, screaming brutes. He wore a small round shield buckled to his left arm instead of the massive body-length type most of the other nobles carried. In it was painted a flying heron, a strangely peaceful emblem in the midst of all this mayhem and gore. — Ben Bova

His happiness stretched out its wings and gave a few flaps. He — Lauren Groff

He returned in a moment with a phone, a high-end model that probably cost way more than hers. His cell phone wallpaper was an abstract artwork with lots of colorful circles and blots - Kandinsky, maybe, or Miro? She always got those
two confused. She gave him points for not having a picture of some scantily-clad woman thrusting her boobs at the camera, like Steve had on his phone. Tacky. Nude-woman wallpapers were the cell phone equivalent of silver naked-lady mud flaps, in her opinion. — Linda Morris

Confederate surgeons usually performed "circular" amputations. They made a 360-degree cut through the skin, then scrunched it up like a shirt cuff. After sawing through the muscle and bone, they inched the skin back down to wrap the stump. This method led to less scarring and infection. Union surgeons preferred "flap" amputations: doctors left two flaps of flesh hanging beside the wound to fold over after they'd sawed through. This method was quicker and provided a more comfortable stump for prosthetics. Altogether, surgeons lopped off 60,000 fingers, toes, hands, feet, and limbs during the war. — Sam Kean

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If you want out of the box you hide in, then you need to crack open the flaps and bask in some sunlight. — Katie McGarry

Tell me everything it explains, he said when he could remember how to speak. Being forced to move moist flaps of meat in order to form the words felt sensual and obscene. — James S.A. Corey

Back home, the dank and mildewstinking halls of Quinlan Castle, and she pauses on the concrete front steps to shake the rain off Jerome's happy yellow umbrella, flaps it open and closed, open and closed, making a furious noise like the death throes of a giant bat or a pterodactyl, spraying a thousand droplets across the steps and the sidewalk. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

And Belen?"
"Yes, Your Majesty?"
Maybe I do want to talk about him. A little. "Humberto would be proud of you, too. He always believed you'd come back to us." Saying his name aloud doesn't hurt as much as I thought it would. Humberto, I practice silently. Humberto.
A soft catch of breath. Then: "He had a way of believing in people long before they believed in themselves, didn't he?"
The entrance to my tent flaps closes, and he is gone. — Rae Carson

I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again. And now it has died of these arid words and shakes and flaps in them
and I hardly know anymore when I look at it how I could ever have felt so happy when I caught this bird. — Friedrich Nietzsche

That was a charming invitation," she murmured, then arched a brow when the man peeled open his fly patch and wagged his personality at her. "Oh, look, kitty. A teeny-tiny little penis." She smiled, leaned just a bit closer. "Better take care of it, asshole, or my pussy here might mistake it for a teeny-tiny little mouse and bite it off." It made her feel better to see what there was of his pride and joy shrivel before he closed his flaps. — J.D. Robb

I think he is losing heart in his attempts to woo her. In that bright-yellow waistcoat, the bottom button always punctiliously undone and the pointed flaps open over his neat little paunch, he is as intent and circumspect as one of those outlandishly plumed male birds, peacock or cock peasant, who gorgeously stalk up and down at a distance, desperate of eye but pretending indifference, while the drab hen unconcernedly pecks in the gravel for grubs. — John Banville

The first instrument I had was made in the late '70s. Back then they had basically one tuning. I shifted slightly away from that tuning right away (to what is now called the Baritone Melody Tuning), because I wanted more string overlap between the two sides.The instrument I currently play has an active pickup system, Fret Rails, a fully adjustible bridge, adjustible truss, Flaps adjustible nut. Even with all of these advances, I'm always struck when I play the older instrument how good they were even then. Emmett's always been great at implementing his ideas. — Greg Howard

It began as most thing begin. Not on a dark and stormy night. Not foreshadowed by ominous here comes the villain music, dire warning at the bottom of a teacup, or dread portents in the sky.
It began small and innocuously, as most catastrophes do. A butterfly flaps its wings somewhere and the wind changes, and a warm front hits a cold front off the coast of western Africa and before you know it you've got an hurricane closing in. By the time anyone figured out the storm was coming, it was too late to do anything but batten down the hatches and exercise damage control. — Karen Marie Moning

Man preys on man; and you mourn for the idle tapestry that decorated a gothic pillar, and the dronish bell that summoned the fat priest to prayer. You mourn for the empty pageant of a name, when slavery flaps her wing, ... Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a hell beyond the grave? - Hell stalks abroad; - the lash resounds on the slave's naked sides; and the sick wretch, who can no longer earn the sour bread of unremitting labour, steals to a ditch to bid the world a long good night. — Mary Wollstonecraft

He supposed it would be considered pastoral-there were trees clustered in a meadow, with two muscular black cows and two improbably fluffy sheep arranged beneath them-and in the sky were two winged cherubs so fat that surely the miracle in question as how they have gotten aloft at all. They would have needed to have the wingspans of albatrosses, not those foolish wee flaps sprouting from their shoulders, he decided, irritated. One of the cows was looking up at them with what he fancied was an expression of surpise and alarm. Which was precisely the expression he would wear if he'd suddenly noticed two fat cherubs bearing down on him. — Julie Anne Long

But Brinker came in. I think he made a point of visiting all the rooms near him the first day. "Well, Gene," his beaming face appeared around the door. Brinker looked the standard preparatory school article in his gray gabardine suit with square, hand-sewn-looking jacket pockets, a conservative necktie, and dark brown cordovan shoes. His face was all straight lines - eyebrows, mouth, nose, everything - and he carried his six feet of height straight as well. He looked but happened not to be athletic, being too busy with politics, arrangements, and offices. There was nothing idiosyncratic about Brinker unless you saw him from behind; I did as he turned to close the door after him. The flaps of his gabardine jacket parted slightly over his healthy rump, and it is that, without any sense of derision at all, that I recall as Brinker's salient characteristic, those healthy, determined, not over-exaggerated but definite and substantial buttocks. — John Knowles

She didn't realize she was fiddling with the back of her earring until he took hold of her hand and pressed a kiss into her palm. Without a word, he pulled her into his lap, surrounded her with the two flaps of his corduroy jacket, and hugged her against him. — Becky Wade

Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip. I prayed for wind shear effect. I prayed for pelicans sucked into the turbines and loose bolts and ice on the wings. On takeoff, as the plane pushed down the runway and the flaps tilted up, with our seats in their full upright position and our tray tables stowed and all personal carry-on baggage in the overhead compartment, as the end of the runway ran up to meet us with our smoking materials extinguished, I prayed for a crash. — Chuck Palahniuk

Because, visible through the slashed covers, the bone-deep wounds that crisscross the couple's bodies pump blood. Some of the flaps of skin resulting from glancing blows are like gills, breathing. Yet even as the cries die away, he carries on. — Mark Kirkbride

It was darker in the tower than any place Devnee had ever been. The dark had textures, some velvet, some satin. The dark shifted positions.
The dark continued to breathe. The breath of the tower lifted her clothing like the flaps of a tent, and sounded in her ears like falling snow.
It's the wind coming through the double shutters, Devnee told herself.
But how could the wind come through? There were glass windows between the inside and outside shutters.
Or were there?
The windows weren't just holes in the wall, were they?
What if there was no glass? What if things crawled through those open louvers, crept into the room, blew in with the cold that fingered her hair? What creatures of the night could slither through those slats?
She had not realized how wonderful glass was, how it protected you and kept you inside.
She knew something was out there. — Caroline B. Cooney

If toes had eyes, then I could see how my feet know where to go, but toes are blind. And how is it that my tongue speaks words it cannot hear? Because for all its eloquence, the tongue itself is deaf, and flaps in soundlessness. — Jane Roberts

As those who have seen Jurassic Park will know, this means a tiny disturbance in one place, can cause a major change in another. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause rain in Central Park, New York. The trouble is, it is not repeatable. The next time the butterfly flaps its wings, a host of other things will be different, which will also influence the weather. That is why weather forecasts are so unreliable. — Stephen Hawking

Despite popular belief to the contrary, there is absolutely no power in intention. The seagull may intend to fly away, may decide to do so, may talk with the other seagulls about how wonderful it is to fly, but until the seagull flaps his wings and takes to the air, he is still on the dock. There's no difference between that gull and all the others. Likewise, there is no difference in the person who intends to do things differently and the one who never thinks about it in the first place. Have you ever considered how often we judge ourselves by our intentions while we judge others by their actions? Yet intention without action is an insult to those who expect the best from you. — Andy Andrews

As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. Where there is nothing, Peter Walsh said to himself; feeling hollowed out, utterly empty within. Clarissa refused me, he thought. He stood there thinking, Clarissa refused me. — Virginia Woolf

The plunge was easier than the pull. The serrated edge caught the flaps of skin on the way out. It wasn't the nature of the blade; he'd chosen specific tools for the torture and wasn't about to skimp on the final cut. Most would have picked the sharpest. The sharpest would allow smooth entry both into and out of the body. He'd used the sharpest on the torso; four quick stabs just above the waist and one to pierce his side. No water; only blood. This final task required a specific tool and he'd chosen a bread knife. It'd been used for that too; winter soups with a rustic loaf, hearty bacon sandwiches in the family home. Use only a little pressure, move it back and forth, letting the edge do the work. That was the easy way to do it, but this wasn't — Darryl Donaghue

In flight a bumblebee flaps its wings 200 times per second (which equals 12,000 rpm), roughly equivalent to the speed of a high-revving motorbike engine. — Dave Goulson

A little brown house sparrow swoops out of the rafters and lands on the tiles in front of her. Marie-Laure holds out an open palm. The sparrow tilts his head, considering. Then it flaps away. One month later she is blind. — Anthony Doerr

I wish I had flaps of extra skin connecting my arms & legs like a Flying Squirrel & then spend my days at the park jumping from tree to tree — Josh Stern

I want to say that yes, it was worth it; that I could suffer through pain and torture for her and go through a lot more than what Puck and his friends are capable of, and I can do it for all of eternity; suffer, until she realizes how much I love her.
But she's gone before I can say any of it.
I wait till she's left.
And then I reach for my wallet.
Hidden inside one of the flaps is a piece of paper that barely conceals a razorblade. Its frayed edges still have my blood on them. The blood is from the previous cuts I've made and I carry it around like a trophy, like Dexter carries around his victims' blood on slides. I use that blade to give myself a cut and it starts bleeding. Right away, it feels as though the pressure that has been building inside me ever since that confrontation with Puck is lifted.
I feel free again. — Kady Hunt

Sometimes a butterfly flaps its wings and the weather turns out fine. — Johnny Rich

I scurry out to the three-way mirror. With an extra-large sweatshirt over the top, you can hardly tell that they are Effert's jeans. Still no Mom. I adjust the mirror so I can see reflections of reflections, miles and miles of me and my new jeans. I hook my hair behind my ears. I should have washed it. My face is dirty. I lean into the mirror. Eyes after eyes after eyes stare back at me. Am I in there somewhere? A thousand eyes blink. No makeup. Dark circles. I pull the side flaps of the mirror in closer, folding myself into the looking glass and blocking out the rest of the store. My face becomes a Picasso sketch, my body slicing into dissecting cubes. I saw a movie once where a woman was burned over eighty percent of her body and they had to wash all the dead skin off. They wrapped her in bandages, kept her drugged, and waited for skin grafts. They actually sewed her into a new skin. — Laurie Halse Anderson

The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return form the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth. Ailinon, alleluia! — Annie Dillard

Time flaps on the mast-- — Virginia Woolf

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. — Sylvia Plath

Chaos theory says that even a small change in initial conditions can lead to wildly unpredictable results. A butterfly flaps her wings now and a hurricane forms in the future. — Nicola Yoon

Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in
one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies — Stephen Colbert

I believe ... that the petal of a flower or a tiny worm on the path says far more, contains far more than all the books in the library. One cannot say very much with mere letters and words. Sometimes I'll be writing a Greek letter, a theta or an omega, and tilt my pen just the slightest bit; suddenly the letter has a tail and becomes a fish; in a second it evokes all the streams and rivers of the world, all that is cool and humid, Homer's sea and the waters on which Saint Peter wandered; or becomes a bird, flaps its tail, shakes out its feathers, puffs itself up, laughs, flies away. You probably don't appreciate letters like that, very much, do you, Narcissus? But I say: with them God wrote the world. — Hermann Hesse

The robotic fly that we actually make the most use of in our laboratory is actually not a small thing, it's a giant thing. It has about a meter wing span, and it flaps in three metric tons of mineral oil. And it is a so-called dynamically scaled fly. — Michael Dickinson

Where is Simus?" Keir asked.

As if at his command, the flaps of the main entrance opened, and there was a commotion as Simus was borne aloft on a cot by four men, like the roast pig at the mid-winter festival. I had to smile, and saw that others in the crowd were not immune to the humor of the image.

"Make way!" Simus boomed out, his voice filled with laughter. "Make way!" He grinned like a fool, white teeth gleaming in his dark face, carried aloft over everyone's head, propped up with brightly colored pillows. But his joy changed to a yell of panic when one of his bearers stumbled slightly. This caused an outbreak of laughter in the crowd, as Simus berated his bearers for their clumsiness. — Elizabeth Vaughan

With a squeak she flaps her bat shawl and runs. A burly rough pursues with booted strides. He stumbles on the steps, recovers, plunges into gloom. Weak squeaks of laughter are heard, weaker.)_ THE BAWD: _(Her wolfeyes shining)_ — James Joyce

His sudden and utterly overwhelming panic was over almost before it began; but not quickly enough. In the midst of his brief yet total terror, the King of Pontus shat himself. It went everywhere, solid faeces mixed with what seemed an incredible amount of more liquid bowel contents, a stinking brown mess all over the gold-encrusted purple cloth of his cushion, trickling down the legs of his throne, running down his own legs into the manes of the golden lions upon the flaps of his boots, pooling and plopping on the deck around his feet when he jumped up. And there was nowhere to go! He could not conceal it from the amazed eyes of his attendants and officers, he could not conceal it from the sailors below amidships who had looked up instinctively to make sure their King was safe. — Colleen McCullough

It infuriated me that men could walk around feeling perfectly good about their appearance whether they had a unibrow, triple chin, or skin flaps hanging off their eyelids, but stunning women like Faidra felt the need to have an unblemished butthole. The world is insane. Not — Jennifer Coburn

It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe. — Neil Gaiman

The cabbage white flies through the tailor's cheek. The tailor sinks his head. The cabbage white flies out of the back of the tailor's head, white and uncrumpled. Skinny Wilma flaps her handkerchief. The cabbage white flies through her forehead and into her head. — Herta Muller

flaps and buttons. She concealed her gray hair — Victor Hugo

I came to regard my body in a new light. For the first time I apprehended the little mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young, and their physical resemblance to udders on cows or the swinging distensions on lactating hounds was suddenly unavoidable. Funny how even women forget what breasts are for.
The cleft between my legs transformed as well. It lost a certain outrageousness, an obscenity, or achieved an obscenity of a different sort. The flaps seemed to open not to a narrow, snug dead end, but to something yawning. The passageway itself became a route to somewhere else, a real place, and not merely to a darkness in my mind. The twist of flesh in front took on a devious aspect, its inclusion overtly ulterior, a tempter, a sweetener for doing the species' heavy lifting, like the lollipops I once got at the dentist. — Lionel Shriver

Take any two-year-old through a car wash and their skulls are blown. FLAPS! FOAM! ROLLING THINGS! It's the closest they'll ever get to being inside a working spaceship. — Drew Magary

The three auto companies in the United States, they're all scrambling to come up with a plan, some way to reinvent themselves. Well this week Ford did its part. Ford unveiled a new hybrid, the Ford Fusion, which will get almost 40 miles to the gallon. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, and when asked how much it would cost, a spokesman for Ford said, '$25 billion.' They just want that money; they don't care. That's without mud flaps. — Conan O'Brien

Egwene didn't notice someone new entering the tent. Rand did, however, and he spun as the flaps parted and let in light. He frowned at the interloper.
His frown died as soon as he saw the person who entered.
Moiraine. — Robert Jordan

After some time my husband reached over to hold my hand, which reminded me that at least there was this, at least we still had hands that remembered how to love each other, two bone-and-flesh flaps that hadn't complicated their simple love by speaking or thinking or being disappointed or having memories. They just held and were held and that is all. Oh, to be a hand. — Catherine Lacey

I had always thought that vaginas, with their flaps and folds, looked somehow unfinished. — David Burr Gerrard