Hairpin Quotes & Sayings

One of the problems, frankly, the Republicans seem to have had is they don't like his [Donald Trump] personality, his tactics, but they basically agree with him on so many of the issues. — Hillary Clinton

He lay in bed open-eyed in the dark. There were intestinal moans from his left side, where gas makes a hairpin turn at the splenic flexure. He felt a mass of phlegm wobbling in his throat but he didn't want to get out of bed to expel it, so he swallowed the whole nasty business, a slick syrupy glop. This was the texture of his life. If someone ever writes his true biography, it will be a chronicle of gas pains and skipped heartbeats, grinding teeth and dizzy spells and smothered breath, with detailed descriptions of Bill leaving his desk to walk to the bathroom and spit up mucus, and we see photographs of ellipsoid clots of cells, water, organic slimes, mineral salts and spotty nicotine. Or descriptions just as long and detailed of Bill staying where he is and swallowing. — Don DeLillo

The woman named Tomorrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time — Carl Sandburg

He picks the lock of her dreams with her own hairpin. — Patti Smith

How can you build on such a quicksand? Their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or a curling tongs. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Violet tried the door latch. Locked, of course. Wordlessly, she pulled a hairpin from her wind-mussed chignon and handed it to him. He stared at it. "What makes you think I know how to pick locks?" he whispered. "Just because I'm a spy?" "No. Because you were forever stealing pocket money from your father's top desk drawer." Bloody hell. She truly had been paying attention. — Tessa Dare

What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-women's shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hairpin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself for hours gazing into test tubes with her hair a mess, or climb a promontory with the girls and get drunk at the top, or sit down when the Pledge of Allegiance says stand, or hop a freight train, or take lovers without telling her last name, or run away to sea. She might revel in all the freedoms that seem so trivial to those who could take them for granted; she might dream seriously the dreams that seem to obvious to those who grew up with them really available. Who knows what she would do? Who knows what it would feel like? — Naomi Wolf

Close your eyes and let the mind expand. Let no fear of death or darkness arrest its course. Allow the mind to merge with Mind. Let it flow out upon the great curve of consciousness. Let it soar on the wings of the great bird of duration, up to the very Circle of Eternity. — Hermes Trismegistus

Now we are going to make a new-way path. So you take a shovel, you take a ground-haker, you take a hairpin and you start digging. And you dig in all directions: up and down, in and out, right and left. Not in a straight line. Nothing natural or interesting goes in a straight line. As a matter of fact, it is the quickest way to the wrong place. And don't pretend you know where you are going. Because if you know where you are going, that means you've been there, and you are going to end up exactly where you came from. — Sherry Ruth Anderson

She wouldn't remember that at a certain corner I had stopped to pick up her hairpin, or that, when I bent down to tie her laces, I remarked the spot on which her foot had rested and that it would remain there forever, even after the cathedrals had been demolished and the whole Latin civilization wiped out forever and ever. — Henry Miller

In the best writers, the outward-reaching interest in the 'found subject' leads back at a hairpin to some uncomfortable inner recognition that the writer has journeyed very far to see; he comes home half-dead. — Amity Gaige

It wasn't what lay at the end of her road that frightened Ammu as much as the nature of the road itself. No milestones marked its progress. No trees grew along it. No dappled shadows shaded it. No mists rolled over it. No birds circled it. No twists, no turns or hairpin bends obscured even momentarily, her clear view of the end. This filled Ammu with an awful dread, because she was not the kind of woman who wanted her future told. She dreaded it too much. So if she were granted one small wish perhaps it would have been Not to Know, Not to know what each day hed in store for her. Not to know where she might be, next month, next year. Ten years on. Not to know which way her road might turn and what lay beyond the bend. — Arundhati Roy

It was 2:49 in the morning. I had never, in my entire life, felt less tired. — John Green

...holding your hand out and making a gesture that, in the surreal parrallel universe of the classroom would suggest that instruction, but anywhere else would be taken for a drunkard's poorly achieved impression of an epileptic spider failing to negotiate a hairpin bend. — Phil Beadle

We're all in this together and we don't have much time. — Richard Aitken

He took a hairpin out of my untidy hair (by now my complicated arrangement of ringlets must have looked as if a couple of birds had been nesting there); he took a strand of it and wound it around his finger. With his other hand he began stroking my face, and then he bent down and kissed me again, this time very cautiously. I closed my eyes - and the same thing happened as before: my brain suffered that delicious break in transmission. — Kerstin Gier

Beyond it was the entrance to Bell's Amusement Park. That adjunct to the Tulsa State Fair is gone now, but in September of 1992, Bell's was blasting away full force. Both roller coasters - the wooden Zingo and the more modern Wildcat - were whirling and twirling, trailing happy screams behind each hairpin turn and suicidal plunge. — Stephen King

Watch little by little the night turn around. Echoes in the house; want to go up, dare not. A glow behind the screen; wish to go through, cannot. It would hurt too much, to see the swallow on her hairpin. Truly shame me, to see the phoenix in her mirror. To Hengtang I return at dawn Fading like light on a jewelled saddle. — Madeleine Thien

Sent to the Monk"

Night falls
and the empty intimacy of the whole world
fills my heart to frothing.
The past has trudged to this one spot
and falls into the stream,
its flashlight in its mouth.
Ancient tears beneath the surface
rise and scatter like carp,
while an ivory hairpin floats away
like a loose tooth going back in time.

Columbia Poetry Review. Spring 2014 — Mary Ruefle

We have been naive enough to believe that we were invincible; that we could run blind through the hairpin turns of life at treacherous speeds and never crash. — Jodi Picoult

The road climbed into the mountains, Jonah taking the hairpin curves as fast as he dared.
"You look so macho clutching the door handle that way," he said to Hamilton.
"Just ... be ... careful," Hamilton said through clenched teeth. — Jude Watson

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour
landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ...
But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? — Virginia Woolf

One of her dearest and handsomest friends was a sorcerer, and from him she had learned so much magic even her hairpins got up and started living serious-minded lives, writing hairpin-ballads, celebrating hairpin-holidays, and inventing several new schools of philosophy. — Catherynne M Valente

It's not about what we do, or what we feel, it's about what He did and what He felt. It's about what Christ has done for us. — Mike Donehey

The ride back to Kathmandu was comfortable and relaxing. There were more overturned trucks (the gas-powered ones seem to tip the most often, I'm surprised there weren't more explosions), goats being herded across the highway by ancient women, children playing games in traffic, private cars and buses alike pulling over in the most inconvenient places for a picnic or public bath, and best of all the suicidal overtaking maneuvers (or what we would call 'passing') by our bus and others while going downhill at incredible speeds or around hairpin turns uphill with absolutely no power left to actually get around the other vehicle. — Jennifer S. Alderson

You'll notice that the Intrepid's inertial dampeners don't work as well in crisis situations, Dahl remembered Jenkins telling them. The ship could do hairpin turns and loop-de-loops any other time and you'd never notice. But whenever there's a dramatic event, there goes your footing. — John Scalzi

After she left, he stood as still as he dared, listening to the sound of the cart recede into the distance. Listening, past all hope of hearing her. He wasn't even conscious of breathing, and yet his lungs ached fiercely. He had been wrong. It would have been easier if it had slain him. But he was still standing. Still cogent. And that meant he was all too aware of how badly it hurt. He clutched her hairpin until the metal cunt into the palm of his hand, unable to let even that much go. — Courtney Milan

On a hairpin turn, above the dead forest, on no day in particular, a white Toyota crashed into a black Mercedes, for a moment blending into a blur of gray. — Neal Shusterman

Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images ... it bleeds relationships through suspicion, lack of confidence and self-respect, the inability to enjoy life, to walk or talk or think normally, the exhaustion, the night terrors, the day terrors. There is nothing good to be said for it except that it gives you the experience of how it must be to be old, to be old and sick, to be dying; to be slow of mind; to be lacking in grace, polish and coordination; to be ugly; to have no belief in the possibilities of life, the pleasures of sex, the exquisiteness of music or the ability to make yourself and others laugh. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I'll never forget one morning I walked in and I had a hell of a bruise - it had been a difficult night the night before - and a client said to me, 'Good God, Vidal, what happened to your face?' And I said, 'Oh, nothing, madam, I just fell over a hairpin.' — Vidal Sassoon

People were too anesthetized to the world around them, — Nicole Williams

I just don't want people to think I'm too sweet of a boy; and little miss angel boy, because I'm going to get caught doing somebody horrible. — Michael Buble

What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour - landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ... — Virginia Woolf

There is another, more sinister consequence of affirmative action: the carefully engineered appearance of great racial progress strengthens the "colorblind" public consensus that personal and cultural traits, not structural arrangements, are largely responsible for the fact that the majority of young black men in urban areas across the United States are currently under the control of the criminal justice system or branded as felons for life. In — Michelle Alexander

I found it when I was getting the crushed bees for Merripen's poultice. I brought it back for you." He looked vaguely apologetic. "I meant to tell you about it earlier, but it slipped my mind."
Amelia stifled a laugh. The average man would hardly forget something like a cache box possibly containing treasure ... but to Cam, it probably had little more significance than a box of hazelnuts. "Only you," she said, "could go looking for bee venom and find hidden treasure." Lifting the box, she shook it gently, feeling the movement of weighty objects within. "Blast, it's locked." She reached in the wild disarray of her coiffure. Finding a hairpin, she handed it to him.
"Why do you assume I can pick a lock?" he asked, a sly flicker in his eyes.
"I have complete faith in your criminal abilities," she said. "Open it, please."
Obligingly he bent the pin and inserted it into the ancient lock. — Lisa Kleypas

Our supreme duty is to advance toward freedom-physical, mental, and spiritual-and help others to do so. — Swami Vivekananda

I love being coached. I get angry when I'm not coached. I ask a lot of questions and certainly appreciate any insight and feedback. I think if you ever stop listening to coaching or stop asking questions, you probably need to be doing something else. — Peyton Manning

Jesus was always at the wheel, but he's not particularly cautious. In fact, he takes hairpin turns at seventy miles per hour if you want to know the truth of it. But as he is God, I've always figured he knows how to drive better than I do. — Lisa Samson

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin. — Virginia Woolf