Grooves Quotes & Sayings

I was ten when I heard the music that ended the first phase of my life and cast me hurtling into a new horizon. Drenched to the skin, I stood on Dunoon's pier peering seawards through diagonal rain, looking for the ferry that would take me home. There, on the everwet west coast of Scotland, I heard it: like sonic scalpels, the sounds of electric guitars sliced through the dreich weather. My body hairs pricked up, each one a willing receiver for the Thunder-God grooves. To my young ears, the sound of these amplified guitars was angelic (although, with hindsight, I don't suppose angels play Gibson guitars at ear-bleeding volume). A voice that suggested vocal chords of polished silver soared alongside razor-sharp overdriven riffs. I knew that I was hearing the future. — Mark Rice

There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart,
The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust.
A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest
corner of it. — Carl Sandburg

Memory is the place where our vanished days secretly gather ... The past seems to be gone and absent. Yet the grooves in the mind hold the traces and vestiga of everything that has ever happened to us. Nothing is ever lost or forgotten. — John O'Donohue

Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow. — Noam Chomsky

His legs remembered the correct position for squatting down with toys. He played. He fit the round male studs into the round female grooves. He got some thinking done as he hunkered down on his fallen-sleep legs. — Colson Whitehead

Wanted to highlight that to a certain extent and go deeper into that direction. I also try to write each song in a different key, so I can be as diverse as I can. I'm always trying to push the envelope and not be complacent or happy in one spot. As far as the grooves on this record are concerned, I think we just tried to experiment in that realm. — Jason C. Miller

True politeness is to social life what oil is to machinery, a thing to oil the ruts and grooves of existence. False politeness can shine without warming and glitter without vivifying. — Frances Harper

We sift reality through screens composed of ideas . (And such ideas have their roots in older ideas.) Such idea systems are necessarily limited by language , by the ways we can describe them. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts move. If we seek new validity forms (other laws and other orders) we must step outside language. — Frank Herbert

When she'd finished, she cut the thread with a pair of scissors, patted the wound once more and stepped back. "Better."
"No bandage?"
She shook her head. "No bandage. Need air."
"All right. I guess you're the doctor." He grabbed her hand and pulled her onto his lap. Even in the midst of inflicting pain she'd aroused his lust. "Don't I get a reward for being a good patient?"
"I don't understand." She delivered the all-purpose phrase he'd taught her.
"Reward. A kiss."
The grooves in her cheeks flashed as her lips turned up. "Yes, you need a kiss." And she bent her head to give him one. — Bonnie Dee

Shakespeare is God, of course. I have studied his plays for the vast majority of my sentient life. When I was a kid, my parents found an old copy of the LP recording of Richard Burton in John Gielgud's Broadway production of Hamlet and they gave it to me for my birthday. I listened to it till the grooves wore thin and I was off and running. — Ken Ludwig

And then they walk away together, out of the allotted grooves of their afternoons and into the thickening shadows of evening, into the dim, liminal place where on path is taken, and another missed. — Laura Barnett

Digital technologies are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything
and they're doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth. — Jaron Lanier

Your heart is the correspondent of your soul. It knows the grooves of joy. — Karen Ruimy

Where, then, is any particular gene - say, the gene for long legs in humans? This is a little like asking where is Beethoven's Piano Sonata in E minor. Is it in the original handwritten score? The printed sheet music? Any one performance - or perhaps the sum of all performances, historical and potential, real and imagined? The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the air; nor grooves etched in vinyl or pits burned in CDs; nor even the neuronal symphonies stirred up in the brain of the listener. The music is the information. Likewise, the base pairs of DNA are not genes. They encode genes. Genes themselves are made of bits. — James Gleick

Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK. — Tana French

We talk of high philosophies and our ancient greatness but act in narrow grooves and show intolerance to our neighbour. These are basic questions for us to keep in mind, for our future depends on the answer that we give to them. — Jawaharlal Nehru

It's like we get so set in our ways, so entrenched in those grooves, we stop seeing our loved ones for who they are. But tonight, right now, I see you again, like the first time we met, when the sound of your voice and your smell was this new country. — Blake Crouch

An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms. — Mark Tobey

Wisdom is a tree of slow growth; the rings around its trunk are earthly lives, and the grooves between are the periods between lives. Who grieves that an acorn is slow in becoming an oak? — Elsa Barker

This mouth had kissed me so much it had worn its own grooves into my teeth. It was like settling into the armchair that fit exactly the round of your body, only it was incredibly exciting because everything was different now, and it was horribly wrong to be kissing. It would only prolong everything. I sat there in the bus shelter, back up against the glass, hoping the bug would never come. Desperation is the sexiest emotion. — Michelle Tea

Gerthe also talked about travel. She talked about living in Jamaica. She joked about her husband and her haircut, because she is more than the earthquake. A person's tragedy does not make up their entire life. A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren't one story. — Amy Poehler

Musicians sort of knew this already - that the emotional center is not the technical center, that funky grooves are not square, and what sounds like a simple beat can either be sensuous or simply a metronomic timekeeper, depending on the player. — David Byrne

Our parents surround us with origin stories that create deep grooves in the vinyl records of our lives. — Amy Poehler

Forget demolishing the grooves of the past. What you're creating is a new groove so deep, so powerful, that your thoughts will automatically flow down this one. — Kamal Ravikant

We're worn into grooves by Time-by our habits. In the end, these grooves are going to show whether we've been second rate or champions, each in his way in dispatching the affairs of every day. By choosing our habits, we determine the grooves into which Time will wear us; and these are grooves that enrich our lives and make for ease of mind, peace, happiness - achievement. — Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr.

Look closely, and you can see where the grooves of a record widen, indicating a sparseness that can only be a bass solo, or grow denser to accommodate a cresting density of sound. — Adam Mansbach

Diana accuses me of losing my sense of history. The hands that arrange her bones, that brush away the layers of earth that weighed heavy on her for fifty million years, those hands should be light and unattached, not heartsick, that embarrassing word, not longing for human touch, for the particular grooves of another person's lifetline, but something else entirely, a pair of moving parts mindful of all that is ancient, and endures. I bristle at her rebuke, knowing she is right. — Tahmima Anam

There were many factors that made a handgun either accurate or not accurate. The velocity of the round and the length of the barrel were the most important, aided or not by aerodynamic subtleties like the degree of spin imparted by the rifling grooves, which either worked well or didn't, depending on the bullet. Precision of manufacture was influential, with careful machining of quality metal much preferred over casting from leftover slag. Not that anything much mattered at seven feet. A pore to the left or a wrinkle to the right was immaterial. The human face was a big enough target, generally hard to miss at close quarters, and the man-on-first's was no exception. — Lee Child

A leaf that is destined to grow large is full of grooves and wrinkles at the start. Now if one has no patience and wants it smooth offhand like a willow leaf, there is trouble ahead. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

What we hear now is great-sounding records with great-sounding grooves and loops. And the sound of these records is irresistible, but the craft of songwriting is just about over. That's why, whenever I get an opportunity to do an album full of standards, I jump at it because I miss it. — Barry Manilow

I grew up loving Etta James and Aretha Franklin and Al Green and Otis Redding, and I just love old-school R&B. It's just music that moves you and grooves you, and it was very important, I think, for music. — Elle King

It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Guys like him, the ones who grip the Bible so tight they leave fingernail grooves, they're the ones who are the most scared of their dark side. Always going too far the other way, fighting for the Lord, often just because it gives them an excuse to fight. — David Wong

The holy stone looked for all the world like a small iron pineapple, its surface divided into squares by deep grooves, a tarnished silver-steel handle or lever held tight to the side. In ancient times the pineapple was ever the symbol of welcome, though the church used the objects in a different way. Apparently, each theological student of good family and destined for high office was given one on beginning their training and forbidden from pulling the lever on pain of excommunication. A test of obedience they called it. A test of curiosity I called it. Clearly the church wanted bishops who lacked the imagination for exploration and questioning. — Mark Lawrence

Work is, after all, not a busy running back and forth in established grooves, though that is the essence of our modern business and academic life, but the supreme energy and disciplined curiosity required to cut new grooves. — Hugh Nibley

Do me a favor?" he whispered.
Beth's hold tightened on his hand. "Anything, what do you need?"
"Hum the Jeopardy theme." There was a pause.Then Beth burst out laughing and swatted his shoulder.
"Wrath-"
"Actually,take your clothes off and hum it while doing some belly grooves." As his shellan bent down and kissed his forehead, he looked up at her through his wraparounds. "You think I'm kidding? Come on, we both need the distraction. And I promise I'll tip well"
"You never carry cash."
He extended his tongue and swept it over his upper lip. "I plan on working it off. — J.R. Ward

I love grooves and dance music, but I like the feeling behind songs too. — Michael Kiwanuka

This game still had its old ritual fascination for Pug; he was following it tensely, smoking a cigar. Once his nostalgia had been keen for the tough youthful combat on the grass, the slamming of bodies, the tricky well-drilled plays, above all for the rare moments of breaking free and sprinting down the field, dodging one man and another with the stands around him a roaring sea of voices. Nothing in his life had since been quite like it. But long ago that nostalgia had departed; those grooves of memory had worn out. To think that lads much younger than his own two sons were out on that chilly field in Philadelphia now, made Victor Henry feel that he had led a very long, multilayered existence, and was now almost a living mummy. Pug! — Herman Wouk

They went to the column, where they stole a few more quiet minutes together, listening to the river wear its way deeper into the earth, the way people wear grooves into each other's hearts. — Jeff Zentner

When he was turning thirty, Jobs had used a metaphor about record albums. He was musing about why folks over thirty develop rigid thought patterns and tend to be less innovative. " People get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them, " he said. At age forty-five, Jobs was now about to get out of his groove. — Walter Isaacson

The old grooves must be erased in your brain, without forming new ones. You must realize yourself as the immovable, behind and beyond the movable, the silent witness of all that happens. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Her young soul felt cut up like a fifty-year-old, like a squirrel that appeared content, but carried scars from the vestige of time in its black and gray grooves. — Meghna Pant

Eyes the infinite black of the night sky bore into her and carved deep grooves along every curve. She felt the weight of his desire wash over her like the slow rise of dawn creeping across the bed in the morning. It singed every inch of her. — Airicka Phoenix

Guitar solos bore the hell out of me. Only a few guitarists interest me, and it's not about the solos they play, it's about the grooves they create. — Dan Auerbach

It is a simple matter to see the obvious, to do the expected. The tendency of the individual life is to be static rather than dynamic, and this tendency is made into a propulsion by civilization, where the obvious only is seen, and the unexpected rarely happens. When the unexpected does happen, however, and when it is of sufficiently grave import, the unfit perish. They do not see what is not obvious, are unable to do the unexpected, are incapable of adjusting their well-grooved lives to other and strange grooves. In short, when they come to the end of their own groove, they die. — Jack London

Al and Tommy and I sharing the biggest laugh because it was predicted by everything we did in the first three or four records in my career. It was predicted in the grooves that we would be here sometime later on down the road. — Al Jarreau

Near his foot was a map of Gettysburg, and he looked down at the ridges and grooves running across the land. It wasn't just the nation that the war had divided; it was families as well. Everyone had been fighting for what they thought was right, no matter who was on the opposite side of the line, whether it was your father or your brother or your son. It was about issues and causes and ideas, and what more could you ask of a person, Peter thought, than to risk all that they were for all they believed they could be? — Jennifer E. Smith

Son of a mother! Hazel reached the stern and couldn't believe what she saw. When she heard the word turtle, she thought of a cute little thing the size of a jewelry box, sitting on a rock in the middle of a fishpond. When she heard huge, her mind tried to adjust - okay, perhaps it was like the Galapagos tortoise she'd seen in the zoo once, with a shell big enough to ride on. She did not envision a creature the size of an island. When she saw the massive dome of craggy black and brown squares, the word turtle simply did not compute. Its shell was more like a landmass - hills of bone, shiny pearl valleys, kelp and moss forests, rivers of seawater trickling down the grooves of its carapace. — Rick Riordan

She wore comforting grooves in her head — Rainbow Rowell

We prattle about free will, but we're nothing but response ... mechanical reaction in prescribed grooves. — Alfred Bester

But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the grooves will open up. And once the magic descends you don't want to change even the smallest detail. You don't know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated can't-miss feeling, and you don't want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out, but you don't want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun. Your heart's in your throat every time you change sides of the court. — David Foster Wallace

Writing with a simplified alphabet checked the power of custom of an oral tradition but implied a decline in the power of expression and the creation of grooves which determined the channels of thought of readers and later writers. — Harold Innis

There are houses in Gloucester where grooves have been worn into the floorboards by women pacing past an upstairs window, looking out to sea. — Sebastian Junger

When knowledge is missing all other attributes have no grooves in which to rest. — Nelly Mazloum

The things we think about, brood on, dwell on, and exult over influence our life in a thousand ways. When we can actually choose the direction of our thoughts instead of just letting them run along the grooves of conditioned thinking, we become the masters of our own lives. — Eknath Easwaran

If we think of our brains as a map, those early roads are like grooves, tram tracks, easy to fall into. — Philippa Perry

For every person who can imagine a possibility there are tens of thousands who are stuck in the greased grooves of history. — Gary Hamel

Mrs General had no opinions. Her way of forming a mind was to prevent it from forming opinions. She had a little circular set of mental grooves or rails on which she started little trains of other people's opinions, which never overtook one another, and never got anywhere. — Charles Dickens

Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness. — Virginia Woolf

A personal offense is like a scratch on a phonograph record. I couldn't move my thoughts beyond my pain. It kept repeating, as if I were stuck within its grooves. There was only one way to play beyond it. I had to forgive them, so my heart could take its form again. — Laurel Lea

The long triangular grooves on the car had been formed within the death of an unknown creature, its vanished identity abstracted in terms of the geometry of this vehicle. How much more mysterious would be our own deaths, and those of the famous and powerful? — J.G. Ballard

If I release you, you won't scream? I'd rather not continue the conversation like this."
She shook her head, and he freed her. She scrambled away from him, feeling the grooves of the headboard bite into her back when she slammed into it.
He sat back on her bed, his hands on his jean-clad thighs. The hair at his neck curled from dampness. "You don't have to be afraid of me."
She almost laughed. "A stranger breaks in, and I'm supposed to be cool with that?"
"Amy, we're not strangers. — Jaime Rush

The two of them fitting, interlocking, like mothers and daughters are supposed to. Fitting in a way that I never have. My edges have always been too sharp, my grooves too deep. — Jasmine Warga

There's a reason why the story of the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack. Normal rules do not apply here. Imagination then, dream, fantasy. You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymus Bosch. It's a rusty red chamber of hell that cannot be described so I will not try to describe it. It cannot be photographed because some parts of West Kingston, such as Rema, are in the grip of such bleak and unremitting repulsiveness that the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is. — Marlon James

the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack. — Marlon James

I really have shaken hands with where my voice is right now. I think it's got a little deeper; it's got some more grooves in it. — Emmylou Harris

A person's tragedy does not make up their entire life. A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren't one story. We can change our stories. — Amy Poehler

Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out. — Henry Miller

They'd fallen into their old ways, accusatory and evasive, which was reassuring in a perverted way. Leo understood the nasty pull of the regrettable familiar, how the old grooves could be so much more satisfying than the looming unknown. It's addicts stayed addicts. — Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

Institutions provide procedures through which human conduct is patterned, compelled to go, in grooves deemed desirable by society. And this trick is performed by making these grooves appear to the individual as the only possible ones. — Peter L. Berger

If you stand right at the edge of the night sky, some place where one o'clock leaves to meet two, the breeze will carry your words up to the stars. And they'll swallow your secrets until its time to hand them over to the truths in the sky- the ones that draw maps in the black.

They carve their answers into the backs of my hands, the grooves of the words running deep in my palms. — Marlen Komar

All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God. — Mary Hunter Austin

There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words. — Anonymous

Be soft in your practice. Think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course. It will go on its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it out of your sight. It will take you. — Sheng Yen

Don't be 'practical' in politics. To be practical in that sense means that you have schooled yourself to think along the lines, and in the grooves that those who rob you would desire you to think. — James Connolly

They carved your name into the stone and then
they put it in the ground,
I run my fingers through the grooves
When no one's around — Ryan Adams

Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. — Steve Jobs

If you had a thought once, it has no power over you. Repeat it again and again, especially with emotional intensity, feeling it, and over time, you're creating the grooves, the mental river. Then it controls you. — Kamal Ravikant

Shimamoto was in charge of the records. She'd take one from its jacket, place it carefully on the turntable without touching the grooves with her fingers, and, after making sure to brush the cartridge free of any dust with a tiny brush, lower the needle ever so gently onto the record. When the record was finished, she'd spray it and wipe it with a felt cloth. Finally she'd return the record to its jacket and its proper place on the shelf. Her father had taught her this procedure, and she followed his instructions with a terribly serious look on her face, her eyes narrowed, her breath held in check. Meanwhile, I was on the sofa, watching her every move. Only when the record was safely back on the shelf did she turn to me and give a little smile. And every time, this thought hit me: It wasn't a record she was handling. It was a fragile soul inside a glass bottle. — Haruki Murakami

His comb had left visible, parallel grooves through his heavily gelled brown hair, like the tracks of fleeing dinosaurs in a fresh volcanic mudflow. — Neal Stephenson

I went to a foot specialist recently and she said:
"You've broken a bone, it's healed funny."
"What can you do?"
"Not much."
She strapped me up though and that's the reason my foot is hurting, because the strapping gave me cramp.
When I'm about to die I'm going to head ti a swamp so I topple in when the time comes. In 50,000 years when they dig me up, pretty well preserved, the scientists will have to work out what sort of life I led from my bone structure, teeth and whatnot. Maybe I'll be clutching a Felt record or something to give them a clue. They'll look at my foot and say: "This man broke a bone and it's healed funny." And they'll look at the Felt record, analysing the grooves with a Groove Analyser and they'll say: "He was obviously in an indie band and one day the pressure got too much, and he booted a wall." And they wouldn't be far from the truth, those crazy scientists. — Stuart Murdoch

It soon became apparent that the light of the lamp, though bestowing the doubtful privilege of a clearer view of Mr. Repetto's face, held certain disadvantages. Scarcely had the staff of Cosy Moments reached the faint yellow pool of light, in the centre of which Mr. Repetto reclined, than, with a suddenness which caused them to leap into the air, there sounded from the darkness down the road the crack-crack-crack of a revolver. Instantly from the opposite direction came other shots. Three bullets flicked grooves in the roadway almost at Billy's feet. The Kid gave a sudden howl. Psmith's hat, suddenly imbued with life, sprang into the air and vanished, whirling into the night. — P.G. Wodehouse

I would write:
"The soft melting hunk of butter trickled in gold down the stringy grooves of the split yam."
Or:
"The child's clumsy fingers fumbled in sleep, feeling vainly for the wish of its dream."
"The old man huddled in the dark doorway, his bony face lit by the burning yellow in the windows of distant skycrapers."
My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for. If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative. — Richard Wright

I like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass. — David Byrne

A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren't one story. We can change our stories. We can write our own. Melissa and Wendy and Jane and I joked about the Golden Globes and gave each other fake awards. I gave Melissa "Best Person in Charge." She gave me "Most Famous and Most Normal." This meant and means a great deal. — Amy Poehler

So roll up your sleeves, put your mind in gear, be totally ready to receive the gift that's coming when Jesus arrives. Don't lazily slip back into those old grooves of evil, doing just what you feel like doing. You didn't know any better then; you do now. As obedient children, let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God's life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness. God said, I am holy; you be holy. — Eugene H. Peterson

As he reads, his eyes graze each poem's lines like a needle over an LP's grooves, reassembling them into uniform arcades. What he is looking for is key: a gap in the book's mask, a loose thread to unravel its veil. He tries tricks to find new openings- reading sideways, reading upside down, reading white space instead of text- but the words always close ranks like tiles in a mosaic, like crooks in a lineup, and mock him with their blithe expressions. — Martin Seay

I held her shoulder blades, caressing the grooves of her ribs, scooping her in my arms and feeling her tense muscles loosen up. She was indeed a dirty martini with a twist. — Kavipriya Moorthy

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

But it's pretty hard to get a liberal off their mental grooves.) — John Ringo

I'm turning fifty, and it is just now dawning on me that I have limited time," Nash said. "No kidding. I always felt my life was circumscribed by the finite terms, you know? There is a whole world of things I missed out on and will never experience. Whatever I have done, there is an endless amount I have not done. Do you know what that tells me?"
...
"It tells me it is not meant to be this all-encompassing journey. It is not meant to be catholic or encyclopedic. By now I have carved some grooves in this life. A few. What I need to do is hunker down and make those grooves deep and indelible. — Dana Spiotta

He had a quick comprehension and considerable force of character; but, being without the power to combine them, the comprehension became engaged with trivialities whilst waiting for the will to direct it, and the force wasted itself in useless grooves through unheeding the comprehension. — Thomas Hardy

The trouble with specialists is that they tend to think in grooves. — Elaine Morgan

The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I glare at him. 'As a figment of my imagination, I demand you stop insulting me.' I press my fingernails into the grooves of the bite-marks again and shut my eyes. 'And go away. — Elizabeth May

It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace. — Ruth Rendell