Foreshortened Quotes & Sayings

My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey. — Franz Kafka

Sometimes go around with guys who are scuffling
for awhile. But usually they end up marrying some cat with a factory. This is the way world ends, not with a whim but a banker. — Marian McPartland

God took Day's hand from his hip and the other that was digging into his side; grasping them both he pulled them high over his head and pressed them into the pillows, securing them there with one hand. God was shocked by his own self-control, but he refused to hurt his lover. Half of his cock that was inside Day and God slowly rocked back and forth trying to open him up a little more. "Come on, sweetheart. You can do it. Open up, take all of me," God whispered. He concentrated on breathing and not shooting his load before he got all the way in. Day's erection was gone, his cock lying against his left thigh. Fuck. He had to make this good for him. "Breathe, Leo, and push out against me," he instructed. Beads — A.E. Via

There's no crying in baseball and no love in Hell. It's just the rules. You could say it's against our religion, more or less. — Lisa Desrochers

Life is astonishingly short. As I look back over it, life seems so foreshortened to me that I can hardly understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that, quite apart from accidents, even the span of a normal life that passes happily may be totally insufficient for such a ride. — Franz Kafka

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph. — John Updike

Now that im older i'm more aware of things that make me feel complete as a person. I'm trying to concentrate on those things as opposed to things that make feel empty — Mary-Kate Olsen

If we're stuck on one world, we're limited to a single case; we don't know what else is possible. Then - like an art fancier familiar only with Fayoum tomb paintings, a dentist who knows only molars, a philosopher trained merely in NeoPlatonism, a linguist who has studied only Chinese, or a physicist whose knowledge of gravity is restricted to falling bodies on Earth - our perspective is foreshortened, our insights narrow, our predictive abilities circumscribed. By contrast, when we explore other worlds, what once seemed the only way a planet could be turns out to be somewhere in the middle range of a vast spectrum of possibilities. When we look at those other worlds, we begin to understand what happens when we have too much of one thing or too little of another. We learn how a planet can go wrong. — Carl Sagan

The Catholic Church with its foreshortened American history and tangled puritanical roots was as inviolate to my mother and father as it was to the last-ditch aristocrats of Evelyn Waugh. — Maureen Howard

Lusitania, after a Roman province on the Iberian Peninsula that occupied roughly the same ground as modern-day Portugal. "The inhabitants were warlike, and the Romans conquered them with great difficulty," said a memorandum in Cunard's files on the naming of the ship. "They lived generally upon plunder and were rude and unpolished in their manners." In popular usage, the name was foreshortened to "Lucy. — Erik Larson

It was said that the view through the open window above the urinal, straight across the Bay to the Silver Span, was the finest obtainable from such a position anywhere in the world, but today Philip kept his eyes down. Foreshortened, yes, definitely. — David Lodge

Yet this book is to prove that no matter how you travel, how 'successful' your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts. — Jack Kerouac

There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair. — Donella H. Meadows

Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match. — Jodi Picoult

I've always loved Elton John and that is one of my favorite songs by him and Bernie (Taupin). The American songbook is ever-expanding and I feel like it works well with what I was trying to say. — Cheyenne Jackson

One spring morning timing the lean near-liquid progress of a horse on a track, the dust exploding, the rapid hasping of his hocks, coming up the straight foreshortened and awobble and passing elongate and birdlike wish harsh breaths and slatted brisket heaving and the muscles sliding and brunching in clocklike flexion under the wet black hide and a gout of foam hung from the long jaw and then gone in a muted hoofclatter, the aging magistrate snapped his thumb from the keep of the stopwatch he held and palmed it into his waistcoat pocket and looking at nothing, nor child nor horse, said anent that simple comparison of rotary motions and in the oratory to which he was prone that they had witnessed a thing against which time would not prevail. — Cormac McCarthy

My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless
a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there, but it was only plastic. Indecipherable except to some machine. — Haruki Murakami

No matter what they are in life, in memory they always seem to rearrange themselves in the opposite manner. All pleasures are seen as foreshortened and hasty and fleeting, and all pain lingering. — Margaret George

Remind your council that the sins of the fathers aren't that of the sons. — Amelia Hutchins

I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow - getting into my morning bath is usually one of them - that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her own right. This is good and tonic. — C.S. Lewis