Leafing Quotes & Sayings

In high school I was leafing through an anthology that our teachers had given up and I found a poem, I go, "That's so strange. This poem looks so much like my grandfather's poem." — Edward Hirsch

As the sweet apple reddens on a high branch, high on the highest branch the apple pickers forgot
no, not forgot: were unable to reach. — Kathryn Davis

There was a time when only wise books were read helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings. — Czeslaw Milosz

They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends - daring and knowledgable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored while Mo cut leather and fabric to the right size and re-stitched old pages that over countless years had grown fragile from the many fingers leafing through them. — Cornelia Funke

and thought to tart it up with a few Shakespeare quotations, having a vague recollection from my undergraduate days that the Bard was fond of joking about the great pox. I dusted off my battered copy of the Riverside Shakespeare and started leafing through it. Holy crap, I thought, there is a lot of stuff here on syphilis. My curiosity was piqued, and I did some more digging. Was there a connection between Shakespeare's syphilitic obsession, contemporary gossip about his sexual misadventures, and the only medical fact known about him with certainty - that his handwriting became tremulous in late middle age? I wrote an article that appeared in Clinical Infectious Diseases, supposing it to be of scant interest beyond its immediate specialty audience. To my surprise, it generated a fair amount of Internet buzz, and inspired a segment on The Daily Show. I began to think that there might be interest in a book on the topic of writers and disease, written from a medical perspective. — John J. Ross

Billy and the rest wandered out onto the shady street. The trees were leafing out. There was nothing going on out there, no traffic of any kind. There was only one vehicle, an abandoned wagon drawn by two horses. The wagon was green and coffin-shaped. Birds were talking. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, Poo-tee-weet? — Anonymous

I like to say StumbleUpon provides a personal tour of the Internet. The responses are more targeted to your interests than they would be with a regular search engine. If you choose a topic on our site that you're interested in, such as art, Web sites related to art appear, as if you're leafing through an art magazine. — Garrett Camp

The mild June nightbreeze frisking around their ankles and leafing through the pages of a magazine on the hall table. — Stephen King

The weather here is windy, balmy, sometimes wet. Desert springtime, with flowers popping up all over the place, trees leafing out, streams gushing down from the mountains. Great time of year for hiking, camping, exploring, sleeping under the new moon and the old stars. At dawn and at evening we hear the coyotes howling with excitement - mating season. And lots of fresh rabbit meat hopping about to feed the young ones with. — Edward Abbey

On occasion, I like to reread my grandfather's letters. While leafing through them, I'm saddened by what is being lost in modern communication. Soul-baring sentimentality isn't typically poured into text messages, tweets and emails. All too often, personal connections are brushed aside for the sake of convenience in a fast-paced world. — Kristina McMorris

Writers' trousers are famously unpredictable in many ways, but I haven't met another author whose trousers simply disintegrated en route to a reading. There I was, young and nervous and not wearing a frock due to poor body image issues, stuck on a late afternoon train, leafing through my notes in a preparatory way and yet also feeling, somehow, chilly. — A. L. Kennedy

On the day the world is blown up, the playwright whose show opened the night before will be leafing past the news section of the Times to find his review
as he ascends through the stratosphere, oblivious. — Arthur Miller

Desert springtime, with flowers popping up all over the place, trees leafing out, streams gushing down from the mountains. Great time of year for hiking, camping, exploring, sleeping under the new moon and the old stars. At dawn and at evening we hear the coyotes howling with excitement - mating season. — Edward Abbey

Oppressive bastards, think they own the place. I told them that karma's going to kick their asses ... — Laurie Halse Anderson

A person born blind cannot frame the smallest conception of darkness, because he has none of light. The savage knows nothing of poverty, because he does not know wealth and the ignorant has no conception of his ignorance, because he has none of knowledge. — Immanuel Kant

She opened her sketchbook, carefully tore out several pages and handed them to Nasser
three detailed color sketches of three flowers. Leafing through the pages, he translated the message. A petunia: Your presence soothes me. A peppermint flower: warmth of feeling. And heartsease, the flower he'd given her so many times before.
You occupy my thoughts.
"I've been doing a lot of reading," Lee said quietly, setting her sketchbook aside. "You're not the only one who knows what flowers mean. — Kaye Thornbrugh

A priest friend of mine has cautioned me away from the standard God of our childhoods, who loves you and guides you and then, if you are bad, roasts you: God as a high school principal in a gray suit who never remembered your name but is always leafing unhappily through your files. — Anne Lamott

Life etches itself onto our faces as we grow older, showing our violence, excesses or kindnesses. — Rembrandt

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship — Adam Gopnik

The great unspoken paradox of the arduous process of psychoanalysis is that the best patients are the ones who never really needed it in the first place. Abnormal — Allen Frances

And perhaps some other later girl, leafing through her father's library, would come across a footnote in an academic journal and read the name 'Faith Sunderly.' Faith? she would think. That is a female name. A woman did this. If that is so ... then so can I. And the little fire of hope, self-belief and determination would pass to another heart. — Frances Hardinge

And I'm sure than in Poland, or somewhere, it is considered cool to drive a Porsche and wear necklaces and black silk, but at least back in Brooklyn if you did those things you were either a drug dealer or from New Jersey. — Meg Cabot

He knew what I was thinking," the boy said to himself. The old man, meanwhile, was leafing through the book, without seeming to — Paulo Coelho

What's the one superpower of June Elbus?"
I thought about myself from head to toe. It was like being forced to read the most boring part of the Sears catalog. Like leafing through the bathroom accessories pages. Boring brain. Boring face. No sex appeal. Clumsy hands.
"Heart. Hard heart," I said, not sure where it came from. "The hardest heart in the world."
"Hmmm," Toby said, tapping a finger in the air. "That's a useful one, you know. Very handy. The question is ... " Toby paused like he was considering this all very seriously.
"What's the question?"
"The question is, stone or ice? Crack or melt? — Carol Rifka Brunt

By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state. Then there are the adjectives: dreadful, heinous, execrable, vile, and so on. They are not so much as descriptive as judgmental. They carry a weight of censure mingled with fear. Is this not a queer state of affairs? It makes me wonder. I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that nothing is there. Or perhaps words are an attempt to make it be there? Or, again, perhaps there is something, but the words invented it. Such considerations make me feel dizzy, as if a hole had opened briefly in the world. — John Banville

The stars dust gold leafing on his skin. And we are looking at each other, just looking, and I swear there are whole lifetimes lived in those small, shared moments. — Mackenzi Lee

She had tried. She had fought. And she had lost. — Stephanie Clifford

To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music. — Jan Morris

It was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live. — Donna Tartt

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered. — Nelson Mandela

I was leafing through a magazine where there was a before-and-after picture of a woman who went from a size 5 to a size 3 by liposuction. Was she serious? I've cooked bigger turkeys than her "before" picture. — Erma Bombeck

After I consumed Frost in his entirety, my days of exploration began. I read The Diving Comedy while leafing through E. E. Cummings. I read Sidney and Milton and Shelley, piecing together my own aesthetics, my own defence of poetry. I felt alone and religious and desperately sad. — Spencer Gordon

It will always be found that one flourishing institution exists and battens on another mouldering one. The Present itself is parasitic to this extent. — Henry David Thoreau

Calling on each molecule one by one? No way. I just told all of them to be quiet - except for a selected few. — Stefan Hell