Ironed Out Quotes & Sayings

Janie starched and ironed her face and came set in the funeral behind her veil. It was like a wall of stone and steel. The funeral was going on outside. All things concerning death and burial were said and done. Finish. End. Never-more. Darkness. Deep hole. Dissolution. Eternity. Weeping and wailing outside. Inside the expensive black folds were resurrection and life. — Zora Neale Hurston

We followed Mrs. Morton down the High Street. She sailed, like a vessel, along the pavement, skirting around pushchairs and small dogs, and people who had stopped to wipe ice cream from their chins.
July had found its fiercest day yet. The sky was ironed into an acid blue, and even the clouds had fallen from the edges, leaving a faultless page of summer above our heads. Even so, there were those who still nurtured mistrust. We walked past cardigans draped across elbows and raincoats bundled into shopping bags, and one woman who carried an umbrella wedged into her armpit, like artillery. It seemed that people couldn't quite let go of the weather, and felt the need to carry every form of it around with them, at all times, for safekeeping.

The trouble with goats and sheep by Joanna Cannon — Joanna Cannon

She was flighty and poor, a French studies major who quoted Simone de Beauvoir. She wiped her runny nose on her coat sleeve when it was snowing, stuck her head out of car windows the way dogs do, the wind fireworking her hair. That woman was gone now. Not that it was her fault. Vast fortunes did that to people. It took them to the cleaners, cruelly starched and steam-pressed them so all their raw edges, all the dirt and hunger and guileless laughter, were ironed out. Few survived real money. — Marisha Pessl

I have cotton or flannel sheets, depending on the weather. They have to be ironed, and I get my bed changed nearly every day. — Martha Stewart

They were women then
My mama's generation
Husky of voice stout of
Step
With fists as well as
Hands
How they battered down
Doors
And ironed
Starched white
Shirts
How they led
Armies
Headragged generals
Across mined
Fields
Booby-trapped
Ditches
To discover books
Desks
A place for us
How they knew what we
MUST know
Without knowing a page
Of it
Themselves. — Alice Walker

Happy are these who lose imagination: They have enough to carry with ammunition. Their spirit drags no pack, Their old wounds save with cold cannot more ache. Having seen all things red, Their eyes are rid Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever. And terror's first constriction over, Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle Now long since ironed, Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned. — Candace Ward

Without the heavy set aristocratic man snoring away on his side of the bed, without the fresh-eyed child whose hair ribbon needs retying; without the conversation at meals and the hearty appetites and getting dressed for church on time; without the tears of laughter or the worry about making both ends meet, the unpaid bills, the layoffs, both seasonal and unexpected; without the toys that have to picked up lest somebody trip over them, and the seven shirts that have to be washed and ironed, one for every day in the week; without the scraped knee and the hurt feelings, the misunderstandings that need to be cleared up, the voices calling for her so that she is perpetually having to stop what she is doing and go see what they want - without all this, what have you? A mystery: How is it that she didn't realize it was going to last such a short time? — William Maxwell

Men,' Gabby sighs. 'Spend all their time trying to turn you into their mothers, wanting clothes ironed, meals cooked, but then they despise you because you remind them of their mothers. — Ellie Campbell

For me, it's all about the haircut. I don't have a lot of hair to style, so I keep it nice and fresh and tight. I actually go to the barbershop every five days. As soon as your haircut is on point, you have to make sure your outfit is fully ironed, you smell good, and you have clean sneakers on. Pretty much the head-to-toe look. — Vinny Guadagnino

Did you happen to hear anything about me this afternoon?" "Just how you got thrown off the bridge and Ranger jumped in to save you." "Does Mom know?" "Yeah. She ironed sheets for three hours, mumbling about how she wished you were more like your sister with all the kids and a lawyer for a husband, and how she couldn't understand you not wanting to be a butcher. And then she had a couple nips of booze while she was making supper, and some red wine when we sat down to eat, and she was pretty much in a nice stupor by the time I left. — Janet Evanovich

I'd love to be in the '70s. I'd love to have a big, long wig parted down the middle with flat-ironed hair and bell-bottoms. They're actually very flattering for my figure. The wider the leg, the better for a person with a booty. — Sarah Paulson

THE HOUSE straightened up and then go on and fix some of that chicken salad now, say Miss Leefolt. It's bridge club day. Every fourth Wednesday a the month. A course I already got everthing ready to go - made the chicken salad this morning, ironed the tablecloths yesterday. Miss Leefolt seen me at it too. She ain't but twenty-three years old and she like hearing herself tell me what to do. She already got the blue dress on I ironed this morning, the one with sixty-five pleats on the waist, so tiny I got to squint through my glasses to iron. I don't hate much in life, — Kathryn Stockett

On the one hand, there are people known as straight, regular, square (and there are also cubes and tesseracts), classified, degreed, graduated, and moneyed, who live in little boxes made of ticky-tacky, cultivate lawn order, and want to get things ironed out in nothing flat. On the other, there are bohemians, nuts, bums, freaks, eccentrics, beatifics, whollymen, courtesans, vagrants, and hippies (a name which ought to have something to do with the dangerous curves of women's hips), who want to experience the universe in a groovy, swinging, ecstatic, syncopated, rock-and-rolling, mind-blown, turned-on, and far-out way. — Alan W. Watts

I didn't like Dali: now, like you, I do. Like you, I began to drink my Coke with a pinch of salt . Like you, I stopped bothering about ironed clothes. Like you, I sit with a dictionary while reading the papers. Like you, I sit on the compound wall after a bath. — Sachin Kundalkar

She starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see ... — Zora Neale Hurston

I don't clean now, because I'm paralyzed. But let me tell you, I would clean. I cleaned, and I ironed. It's my inner femininity. — Michael Graves

Ballroom dancing was inherently social, but steps replaced words and beats ironed out pauses. The shy, the awkward, and the weird found a home where good rhythm or a barn of a memory vanquished their shyness, awkwardness, and weirdness. Some got good while others stayed middling. Everyone, though, had fun. — Erin Bomboy

When my dad needed a shirt ironed, he would yell downstairs to my mother, who would drop everything and iron his shirt. — Hope Davis

On movies, you have a lot of stylists that get things too pretty. Everything gets steamed and ironed. It's just not the way we really behave. — Tim Heidecker

Andre had never mastered the art of ironing. He usually ironed more wrinkles in than out. Pistols, knives, and explosives he could handle, but put a hot iron in his hands and chances were that he'd get hurt. — Toby Joyce

Slowly the red dawn broke over the endless plain of black grass that gradually turned to the famous Kentucky blue as the sun ironed out the shadows. — Ian Fleming

And yet he felt repelled by the teaching machines. For the entire Public School was geared to a task which went contrary to his grain: the school was there not to inform or educate, but to mold, and along severely limited lines. It was the link to their inherited culture, and it peddled that culture, in its entirety, to the young. It bent its pupils to it; perpetuation of the culture was the goal, and any special quirks in the children which might lead them in another direction had to be ironed out. — Philip K. Dick

The most extraordinary thing about it all was how simple it was just to carry on. There were meals to be prepared and eaten; dishes to be washed; clothes to be laundered, ironed, and put on and taken off; beds to be slept in and made and unmade. The prosaic needs of day-to-day living blunted all impact of the miraculous; it demanded that the glorious be relegated. And she knew that even if she were able to convince everyone involved that she had witnessed something remarkable, had undergone a transcendental and miraculous experience, reached and returned from another world, it almost seemed like it would not ever, and could not ever, truly matter. — Graham Joyce

You have to have approached a place from all four cardinal points if you want to take it in, and what's more, you also have to have left it from all these points. Otherwise it will quite unexpectedly cross your path three or four times before you are prepared to discover it. One stage further, and you seek it out, you orient your-self by it. The same thing with houses. It is only after having crept along a series of them in search of a very specific one that you come to learn what they contain. From the arches of gates, on the frames of house doors, in letters of varying size, black, blue, yellow, red, in the shape of arrows or in the image of boots or freshly-ironed laundry or a word stoop or a stairway's solid landing, the life leaps out at you, combative, determined, mute. You have to have traveled the streets by streetcar to realize how this running battle con-tinues up along the various stories and finally reaches its decisive pitch on the roofs. — Walter Benjamin

I like to have my morning newspaper ironed before I read it. I like to have my shoes boned before they are polished. I like to sit in the back of the car and be driven. I like beds to be made, dishes to be washed, grass to be cut, drinks to be served, telephones to be answered, and common tasks to be dealt with invisibly and efficiently so that I can devote my time to major decisions like the choice of wines for dinner and who to vote for in the next election for the mayor of my village.
That is life as it should be lived, and all it takes is money and servants. — Peter Mayle

Ryan couldn't believe his eyes. Gran wearing leather chaps in a Harley shop, talking about her ass. It was a living nightmare.
"What am I doing here?" he asked Gran. Before he could read her the riot act on safety, Liz stepped in front of him. Her pink shirt was buttoned all the way to the top and tucked into ironed white pants. Her hair was straight and perfect. He had the strangest urge to muss her up. — Kylie Gilmore

I need but say that my most vivid impression in that respect was a mere trifle: one day, on Million Street in St. Petersburg, a truck packed with jolly rioters made a clumsy but accurate swerve so as to deliberately squash a passing cat which remained lying there, as a perfectly flat, neatly ironed, black rag (only the tail still belonged to a cat
it stood upright, and the tip, I think, still moved). At the time this struck me with some deep occult meaning, but I have since have occasion to see a bus, in a bucolic Spanish village, flatten by exactly the same method an exactly similar cat, so I have become disenchanted with hidden meanings. — Vladimir Nabokov

I needed a way to have the platter continuously spinning while I'm moving the record back and forth. I went to a fabric store. When I touched this hairy stuff - felt - I found it. I rubbed spray starch on both sides and ironed it until it became a stiff wafer. After that, I was able to stop time. — Grandmaster Flash

I'll be washed and ironed. I'll be washed and ironed and starched. — Sherwood Anderson

How long did it take me to delimit this art? Twenty years! ... It was a laborious process, but a methodical and rational one; gradually the hesitations were ironed out, but not all of a sudden. — Joaquin Sorolla

Fashions pass quickly, and nothing is more pathetic than those puppets of fashion outrageously made up one day, pale the next, pleated or ironed stiff, libertine or ascetic. Playing with fashion is an art. The first rule is don't burn your wings. — Yves Saint-Laurent

I always insist on my jeans being ironed. Is that a problem? — Jimmy Connors

I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon [Ausweg]. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is. — Erwin Schrodinger

Cole was meticulous to a fault; office scuttlebut had it that he never went out in public without first having his shoelaces ironed. — Robert Littell

I come home that morning, after I been fired, and stood outside my house with my new work shoes on. The shoes my mama paid a month's worth a light bill for. I guess that's when I understood what shame was and the color of it too. Shame ain't black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the color of a new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it. — Kathryn Stockett

Young women in Cameroon have their breasts "ironed" - beaten or massaged by a wooden pestle or a heated coconut shell - to make them less sexually tempting. — Steven D. Levitt

Through it all we held fast to the concept of the clock with no hands. Tasks were completed, sump pumps manned, sandbags piled, trees planted, shirts ironed, hems stitched, and yet we reserved the right to ignore the hands that kept on turning. — Patti Smith

Whose boys are those with the holes in their pants?"
I cringed. How would my grandpa answer such an embarrassing question?
"Those are my daughter's children, my grandchildren," Grandpa spoke as if he'd just been asked who had won first place in a foot race or just been baptized into the church.
"Those pants are very well ironed," the stranger said. — Elizabeth Byler Younts

When my parents went off to Knoxville to work, I lived with my father's mother. She was strict - the kind who starched and ironed dresses. I had to sit more than I played. Oh, I was miserable. I liked being out with the animals. I'd come in the house with my hair pulled out, sash off the dress, dirty as heck. I was always getting spanked. — Tina Turner

If humans were in fact the members of a truly social species, and if their individual differences were trifling and could be completely ironed out by appropriate conditioning, then, obviously, there would be no need for liberty and the State would be justified in persecuting the heretics who demanded it. — Aldous Huxley

In Sardinia one summer my best friend Marisa Berenson and I ironed each other's hair. We used a hot laundry iron and took turns putting our hair on the ironing board, literally ironing it. That's a recipe for straightening that may be highly successful, but is definitely not recommended. — Diane Von Furstenberg

Let's really look at one another! ... It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed ... Wait! One more look. Good-bye , Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners ... Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking ... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths ... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth,you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it
every,every minute? (Emily) — Thornton Wilder

Like most of the others, she'd been wearing the same clothing for a week - in her case, a long-sleeved wool shirt and sturdy green trousers with numerous pockets - but, unlike the others, her garb appeared clean and freshly ironed. Even Maldynado rarely looked so crisp - apparently his love of fashion didn't extend to a love of doing laundry. — Lindsay Buroker

She was both more assured and quieter, deeper. It was as if the distance she had traveled had ironed out some of her foolish impulsiveness, her flippancy. — Amanda Coplin

Mori smiled properly. The lines around his eyes were deeper than usual now. They made him look like an old photograph of a young man, often crushed, but ironed carefully so that only the ghosts of the marks remained. — Natasha Pulley

I wanted to make at least an effort to impress, so I found my best suit, a Primark special that looked like it had been ironed by a blind man — Jay Stringer

Drunk, he was leering and silent and mostly asleep. Sober, he was a watcher, a horror of a man who missed nothing and commented on everything. Nothing was ever done right or cooked right or handed to him properly or ironed straight or finished off fully with him. — Donal Ryan

He owned an apricot polo shirt, and ironed it himself. Yes, he was probably gay. — Liane Moriarty

It helps with your acting when you're not in a perfect costume, perfect wardrobe, a perfectly seamed blouse, perfectly ironed hair, and perfectly done eyeshadow. It's really liberating. — Trieste Kelly Dunn

I have calmed down a little and my work is going better than yesterday, so well, in fact, that it does itself and I can slip back into the womb of time, into my youth, when I ironed my trousers and shined my shoes, soles included, every Saturday, because when you're young you love keeping clean, you love your self-image, an image you still have time to improve. — Bohumil Hrabal

The Church recruited people who had been starched and ironed before they were washed. — John Wesley

When something needs to be ironed I put it in the ironing basket. If a year goes by and the item is still in the basket I throw the item away. This is a good system since eventually I end up only with clothes that don't need ironing. — Janet Evanovich

Jane was wearing a charcoal shift dress. The black dipped into a love V accented with a large black chiffon bow. A layer of delicate black lace peeked out from the bottom of her dress. Her long blond hair was pulled back tightly into a straight ironed ponytail. Her makeup was simple: coral blush on her cheeks and gunmetal shadow brushed under her blue eyes. — Lauren Conrad

To play with a band all of the time, just about nightly, was good for me because I wrote lots of arrangements and I got a lot of my transposition and chords ironed out. — Allen Toussaint

I've loved men that wear un-ironed clothes, it doesn't make me fall out of love. When you love someone, you should see beyond their image. It just makes me want to iron their shirt. But once you love a person, they could wear a garbage bag! — Olga Kurylenko

She yawned and stretched, and settled back again on her pillows and thought how perfect it would be if sleep could not only restore one but iron out all anxieties in the same process, so that one could wake with a totally clear and untroubled mind, as smooth and empty as a beach, washed and ironed by the outgoing tide. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either. — Edward Abbey

The house was clean, scrubbed and immaculate, curtains washed, windows polished, but all as a man does it - the ironed curtains did not hang quite straight and there were streaks on the windows and a square showed on the table when a book was moved. — John Steinbeck

I looked at her dress and I thought, Oh no, it's awful. Because it was all scrunched up, it looked terrible. I just remember thinking, It doesn't look like it's been ironed. The Emanuels reacted the same way and dashed to the rescue. Once the train was properly spread out on the carpeted steps, it looked as dazzling as the young woman who was wearing it. — Tim Clayton

Not all dreams need to be realized ... Fred finally achieved his pilot's license but couldn't afford to fly a plane. I wrote incessantly but published nothing. Through it all we held fast to the concept of the clock with no hands. Tasks were completed, sump pumps manned, sandbags piled, trees planted, shirts ironed, hems stitched, and yet we reserved the right to ignore the hands that kept on turning. Looking back, long after his death, our way of living seems a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind. — Patti Smith

Mothers Who Know Honor God They bring daughters in clean and ironed dresses with hair brushed to perfection; their sons wear white shirts and ties and have missionary haircuts. These mothers know they are going to sacrament meeting, where covenants are renewed. These mothers have made and honor temple covenants. They know that if they are not pointing their children to the temple, they are not pointing them toward desired eternal goals. These mothers have influence and power. — Julie B. Beck

Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts. — Peter Bichsel

I had never ironed anything in my life. The proper pressing of a shirt was a mystery of the universe akin to black holes and dark matter. — Lisa Kleypas

They are here to help pack the gold, mistress. The women wouldn't be able to do it quickly enough , but I reverently ask that you don't tell them I said so. The last time I said anything about Cook's culinary arts, I ate burned food for a week and when I said anything to your lady's maid about how she should do more to help to help you, she put double of starch into my sheets when she ironed them.... She scorched a hole in the sheets at the foot of the bed and my toes got caught in it in the middle of the night. — Terry Spear

Switzerland would me a mighty big place if it were ironed flat. — Mark Twain

Whoever invented men had definitely not ironed out all the kinks. — Judith Kelman

I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It's irrational. — Barry Commoner

Why, the top-notch gentleman visits his hatter every few days just to have his hat ironed! — Michel Faber

When he was about twelve or thirteen he walked into his parents' bedroom in the half-house on Jackson Road not expecting his father to be there, and the old man was standing in front of his bureau in just socks and an undershirt, innocently fishing in a drawer for his undershorts, that boxer style that always looked sad and dreary to Harry anyway, and here was his father's bare behind, such white buttocks, limp and hairless, mute and helpless flesh that squeezed out shit once a day and otherwise hung there in the world like linen that hadn't been ironed ... — John Updike

Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative. — Barbara Kruger