Leaky Quotes & Sayings

The reality was decaying, dingy cities, where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses — George Orwell

Sending money to Washington to have it administered and sent back is like getting a blood transfusion from your right arm to your left arm with a leaky valve. — Ernest Hollings

But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home to a leaky castle across the sea to lie awake in linen smelling of lavender, and hear the nightingale, and long for me. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Gazing for the first time upon this amphibian terrain, this bog of nightmare, I should have felt excited; but the heat and recent events were weighing me down; my upper lip was still childishly wet with nose-goo, but I felt oppressed by a feeling of having moved directly from an overlong and dribbling childhood into a premature (though still leaky) old age. — Salman Rushdie

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances. — David Hume

The fact is, we are leaky vessels, and we have to keep right under the fountain all the time to keep full of Christ, and so have fresh supply. — Dwight L. Moody

Information can't be put in any container that isn't leaky. — Spider Robinson

Kit," said a female voice, "what's wrong with the fridge? All the food's gone. No, wait, there's a really ugly alien in here disguised as a leaky lettuce. Hey, I guess I shouldn't be rude to it; it's a visitor. Welcome to our planet, Mr. Alien!"
This was followed by some muffled remark that Nita couldn't make out, possibly something Kit was saying. A moment later, Kit's sister Carmela's voice came out of Nita's refrigerator again. "Hola, Nita, are your phone bills getting too big? This is a weird way to deal with it ... — Diane Duane

It wasn't what we needed then that was hurting us, it was what we was paying for that we had already used up. The country was just buying gasoline for a leaky tank. Everything was going into a gopher hole and you couldent see where you was going to get any of it back. — Will Rogers

[The biographer] must be as ruthless as a board meeting smelling out embezzlement, as suspicious as a secret agent riding the Simplon-Orient Express, as cold-eyed as a pawnbroker viewing a leaky concertina. — Paul Murray Kendall

Educational equality doesn't guarantee equality on the labor market. Even the most developed countries are not gender-equal. There are still glass ceilings and 'leaky pipelines' that prevent women from getting ahead in the workplace. — Michelle Bachelet

If you weren't humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders. You'd be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you'd feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn't water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you'd feel the stuff eating away at important organs. You'd try to relax. You'd uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you'd think, this isn't so bad. And right then you'd hear gunfire behind you and your nuts would fly up into your throat and you'd be squealing pig squeals. That kind of boredom. I — Tim O'Brien

I've always believed that to some extent you get to decide for yourself what your life will be like. You can either look at the world and say "Oh, isn't it all so tragic, so grim, so awful." Or you can look at the world and decide that it's mostly funny.
If you step back far enough from the details, everything gets funny. You say war is tragic. I say, isn't it crazy the way people will fight over nothing? People fight wars to control crappy little patches of empty desert, for crying out loud. It's like fighting over an empty soda can. It's not so much tragic as it is ridiculous. Asinine! Stupid!
You say, isn't it terrible about global warming? And I say, no, it's funny. We're going to bring on global warming because we ran too many leaky air conditioners? We used too much spray deodorant, so now we'll be doomed to sweat forever? That's not sad. That's irony. — Katherine Applegate

GAPS Diet This diet is intended to heal gut damage in children, which may result in autism, ADHD, severe food allergies, or other outward symptoms. Children who have severe physical and behavioral problems may begin this diet in order to address the underlying causes, which is a so-called "leaky gut." This means that the good gut flora that should be present isn't, and that there are "holes" in the gut wall where undigested proteins are leaking through and into the bloodstream, sensitizing the child. There is also an overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria and likely, candida. The GAPS diet[2] addresses this and helps to actually heal the gut. — Anonymous

It's hard navigating life in a leaky boat. Meet me on the water, Lord. — Crissy Shreve

Poor Crookshanks, that witch said he'd been in there for ages; no one wanted him." "I wonder why," said Ron sarcastically as they set off toward the Leaky Cauldron. — J.K. Rowling

There is fascism , leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders,and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty- in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub-our immediate duty is to stop it. — E. M. Forster

Daemon followed me home after school. Literally. He tailed me in his new Infiniti SUV. My old Camry, with its leaky exhaust and loud muffler, was no match for the speed he wanted to go. I'd brake-checked him several times. He'd blown his horn. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

In order to try whether a vessel be leaky, we first prove it with water before we trust it with wine. — Charles Caleb Colton

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky. — Joel Spolsky

Romance often begins by a splashing waterfall and ends over a leaky sink. — Ellen DeGeneres

You ask me what it feels like to have wings. I can only tell you the feeling with words. And words have neither feelings nor wings. Words are leaky vessels into which a cargo of meaning and emotion are placed, and when they leave you and reach the farther shore of another mind a considerable portion of that cargo has been lost at sea. Fallen overboard, gone to rot, consumed by vermin, decayed to a state unlike its original form. — Steven R. Boyett

[We must] deal with all of the contributing factors to gun violence as a whole, because it's like a leaky bucket - if you've got a bucket with six holes shot through it, [and] you plug up five, you've still got a leaky bucket. — Joycelyn Elders

My roommate is a 240-pound homicidal hermit. For dinner he's fixing me a dead fox he scraped off the highway near Ponchatoula, and after that we're taking a leaky tin boat out on a windy lake to spy on some semi-retarded fishermen. Don't you wish you were here? — Carl Hiaasen

I just bought a great gift for my boss - a leaky ant farm. — Milton Berle

Like the body craves oxygen, the mind is desperate for certainty. It believes that without a safe foothold on reality, it will die.
But the fascinating thing is that the illusion of certainty is exactly the opposite of safety because it hardens and narrows the vision to make everything fit its own scope. Then when new information arrives which would be its ally, the mind pushes it away in favor of the leaky life raft to which it clings, sinking all the while beneath the waves of change.
In fact, the only antidote for this is to embrace 'I don't know' so deeply that a powerful, dynamic safety emerges. This is like learning to surf so well that a tsunami wave shows up as a challenge to test our mastery. — Jacob Nordby

People often ask me, "What's the difference between couplehood and babyhood?" In a word? Moisture. Everything in my life is now more moist. Between your spittle, your diapers, your spit-up and drool, you got your baby food, your wipes, your formula, your leaky bottles, sweaty baby backs, and numerous other untraceable sources-all creating an ever-present moistness in my life, which heretofore was mainly dry. — Paul Reiser

The leaky-replacement hypothesis - assuming for the moment that it's correct - provides the strongest possible evidence for the closeness of Neanderthals and modern humans. The two may or may not have fallen in love; still, they made love. Their hybrid children may or may not have been regarded as monsters; nevertheless someone - perhaps Neanderthals at first, perhaps humans - cared for them. Some of these hybrids survived to have kids of their own, who, in turn, had kids, and so on up to the present day. Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA. One — Elizabeth Kolbert

A leaky faucet, a barking dog-those are things you tolerate. — Candace Gingrich-Jones

Hurry home, darling," she said. "Hurry home." And how's that for a man to have! When I hung up, I stood by the phone all weak and leaky and happy if there is such a condition. I tried to think how it had been before Mary, and I couldn't remember, or how it would be without her, and I could not imagine it except that it would be a condition bordered in black. — John Steinbeck

I am a lone monk walking the world with a leaky umbrella. — Mao Tse-tung

For it seems that long before the first enterprising man bent some twigs into a leaky roof, many animals were already accomplished builders. — Bernard Rudofsky

Society can transport money from rich to poor only in a leaky bucket — Arthur Melvin Okun

I love like a leaky faucet or I love like a dam breaking. There is nothing in between. — Shinji Moon

An ironic death for someone with a leaky space suit: too much oxygen. — Andy Weir

Bless those people, for they are a part of my faith's firmness. Bless the stories my foster mother read to me, the stories of mine she later listened to, her thin blond hair hanging down a single sheet. The house, old and shingled, with niches and culverts I loved to crawl in, where the rain pinged on a leaky roof and out in the puddled yard a beautiful German shepherd, who licked my face and offered me his paw, barked and played in the water. Bless the night there, the hallway light they left on for me, burning a soft yellow wedge that I turned into a wing, a woman, an entire army of angels who, I learned to imagine, knew just how to sing me to sleep. — Lauren Slater

As the station wagon pulled back onto the highway, the sun was slowly sinking below the horizon like a leaky boat. Well, except for that fact that boats are not generally round, orange and on fire. Hmm. Come to think of it, in no way whatsoever did the sun, in this instance, resemble a leaky boat. My apologies. That was a dreadful attempt at simile. Please allow me to try again.
As the station wagon pulled back onto the highway, the sun was slowly sinking below the horizon like a self-luminous, gaseous sphere comprised mainly of of hydrogen and helium. — Cuthbert Soup

If men can quilt and take over the kitchen, then women can pick up a wrench and fix a leaky pipe. — Hanna Rosin

If I had a pair of pliers on me, I'd rip my ears off so I wouldn't have to listen to this anymore. Unfortunately, Brody doesn't even own a toolbox - I found that out when I first moved in and looked around for tools to fix the leaky kitchen faucet with. Brody had shrugged and said, "Shit leaks, man. Life doesn't always give you tools."

I'd wanted to point out that yes, life does give you tools - that's why we have fucking Home Depot. But arguing with Brody's logic is an exercise in futility — Elle Kennedy

It takes a lot of wind to sail a leaky boat. — Tom Morrison

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them. — Robin McKinley

He breathed like an old Ford with a leaky head gasket. — Raymond Chandler

Watch for coupling that's too tight. "Coupling" refers to how tight the connection is between two classes. In general, the looser the connection, the better. Several general guidelines flow from this concept: Minimize accessibility of classes and members. Avoid friend classes, because they're tightly coupled. Make data private rather than protected in a base class to make derived classes less tightly coupled to the base class. Avoid exposing member data in a class's public interface. Be wary of semantic violations of encapsulation. Observe the "Law of Demeter" (discussed in Design and Implementation Issues of this chapter). Coupling goes hand in glove with abstraction and encapsulation. Tight coupling occurs when an abstraction is leaky, or when encapsulation is broken. — Steve McConnell

They told me that I had a leaky valve, which is something that is certainly not life-threatening. It's common and it's something that had I not known about it, would I have lived? Sure. But it's something that I think is important to know, especially as I get older and given that I have heart disease in my family. — Jennie Garth

..allegation[s] of flirting dripping from his lips like drops from a leaky faucet. — Michael Callahan

A plumber is an adventurer who traces leaky pipes to their source. — Arthur Baer

Do you know how wind and water are unstoppable? The smallest cracks give wind and water all they need to creep through and make it chilly and wet. Well, I am also kind of drafty and leaky. I cannot stop up my fissures with purchases at the mall. Neither can I hold back the wind and the water with my expectations of living a spartan life. — Dave Bruno

Life is an extended camping trip. With a leaky, inferior tent one runs no more risk of rain than anyone else; but if it does rain, the person in the cheap tent chances soaking in his sleeping bag, and possibly dying of hypothermia. — William T. Vollmann

If your environment keeps draining your energy, it's like having a leaky bank account, where any money you're putting into the bank, such as by seeing an energy healer, keeps slipping out. You have to change your environment, including any harmful beliefs, before the energy can stay high. — Bruce Lipton

People are leaky. — Douglas Coupland

Somewhat leaky boat are on the lookout for a human companion. Not me. I have learned to love the inside of my own head. There isn't much I'd rather say than think. Of course for more than thirty years I've had Chuck. We've known each other so long that we don't have to talk, and when we do we don't have to say anything. When he asks me if I'd like to take a trip around the world I can say yes knowing I'll never have to go. — Abigail Thomas

His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally- as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls ... — Penelope Lively

The shelter of excuses has a leaky roof. — Ron Kaufman

I've never been tempted to sleep with the same woman every night myself. Let alone reproduce myself in a leaky, noisy miniature human. — Eloisa James

You want a valve that doesn't leak and you try everything possible to develop one. But the real world provides you with a leaky valve. You have to determine how much leakiness you can tolerate. — Arthur Rudolph

Good sex is an all-day affair. You can't treat your wife like a servant and expect her to be eager to sleep with you at night. Your wife's sexual responsiveness will be determined by how willingly you help out with the dishes, the kids' homework, or that leaky faucet that drips throughout the night. — Kevin Leman

Worry is different from fear. If fear is like a raging fever, worry is a low-grade temperature. It nags at us, simmers in our souls, hovers in the back of our minds like a faint memory. We may fear certain realities, like death; we worry about vague possibilities. Worry distracts us more than paralyzes us. It is like a leaky faucet we never get around to fixing. — Gerald Lawson Sittser

I live in a dumb house. Which is not to say that I don't love its quirky charm, its drafty windows and leaky fireplaces and an electrical system that protests when too many people are trying to vacuum and microwave at the same time. But charm is not always user-friendly. — Nancy Gibbs

You've probably noticed that after the first half-century practically everybody gets leaky, they can't keep it in ... hence the cruelty of long drawn-out meals and drinking sessions ... ships and apartment houses are the same ... everything starts to leak ... sphincters, bladders, drain pipes, bowels ... the half-century is merciless for ladies and gentlemen ... worse for dogs and cats! ... with them it comes sooner! ... five ... six years ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Her feet tingled. One whole hour to forget about the leaky kitchen sink, her father's retirement party, and her mother's relentless questions about it. She closed her eyes. One whole hour to completely unwind and indulge her thoughts in something beside caterers, plumbers, and homicide cases. — Lisa Harris

I discovered is that I have a couple of valves that were leaky and had been giving, gave me a problem then. But I hadn't noticed anything up until then.A couple of incidents of shortness of breath and checked myself into a hospital, but that one in France really sat me down for a few minutes - a very few minutes, because seven days later I was in the studio, and eight days later, I was no the stage. — Al Jarreau

Love, is a Bloody Razor Blade
Love came like fire from above
and disappeared like a wet dream,
underneath a leaky kitchen sink
For weeks it went drip, drip, drip ...
until it could be, eventually fixed
It took a long time to depreciate
all the things I never had to say
But there are only so many things
that make sense at the end
The rest is merely X-Acto knife love, and
Love, is a bloody razor blade — Phil Volatile

Looks like I've found myself a handy man," I smiled.
"Oh yeah," he grinned, "I'm as handy as they come."
"I can see it now," I fantasized, "leaky faucets, fixing lights, painting walls."
Caeden's laugh filled the woodshop classroom. "And let me guess, you're not going to help me, you'll just watch."
"It's what I do best," I laughed.
Caeden stood the cabinet upright and grabbed some trim pieces for detailing. "That's okay, at least I'll have something pretty to look at," he winked.
"And I'll always be there to hand you tools," I said.
"Just not the power ones," he grinned crookedly. — Micalea Smeltzer

The economy which prefers fictitious money to real, is, at best, like that which prefers a leaky ship to a sound one. — Thomas E. Woods Jr.

A new beginning done right," she said out loud, because everyone knew that saying it out loud made it true. "You hear that, karma?" She glanced upward through her slightly leaky sunroof into a dark sky, where storm clouds tumbled together like a dryer full of gray wool blankets. "This time, I'm gong to be strong." Like Katharine Hepburn. Like Ingrid Bergman ."So go torture someone else and leave me alone."
A bolt of lightning blinded her, followed by a boom of thunder that nearly had her jerking out of her skin. "Okay, so I meant pretty please leave me alone."
-Maddie — Jill Shalvis

I've had my say out, and I shall be the' easier for't all my life. There's no pleasure i' living, if you're to be corked up forever, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel. — George Eliot

Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others' stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling. — Rebecca Solnit

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip. — John Updike

Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. — Herman Melville

The girls Iris went through wound up cracked vases no longer fit for flowers, leaky dust collectors. After Iris, girls left town or started fucking boys. She ruined everyone. — Michelle Tea

The boy took a step toward her. Lex jumped back, her contentious instincts kicking in. "Stop right there," she warned. "I punch, I kick, and I feel compelled to warn you, I can bite harder than the average Amazonian crocodile."
He smirked and leaned against the doorframe. "And I feel compelled to warn YOU that the bathroom we now share has a leaky ceiling," he said, pointing up. "There's an umbrella under the sink, if you're going to be in here for a while. — Gina Damico

Looking for a snack? Try wheat or a wheat by-product. Dinner? Wheat &/or its by-product. Trying to patch a leaky roof? We have just the thing for you, and we also have its by-product. — Joseph Fink

Can I? Yeah. You bet I can. There's a million things in this world can't do. Couldn't hit a curve ball, even back in high school. Can't fix a leaky faucet. Can't roller-skate or make an F-chord on the guitar that sounds like anything but shit. I have tried twice to be married and couldn't do it either time. But if you want me to take you away, to scare you or involve you or make you cry or grin, yeah. I can. I can bring it to you and keep bringing it until you holler uncle. I am able. I CAN. — Stephen King

Those who have no real virtue within but outwardly rely on flowery cleverness are like leaky boats brightly painted - if you put manikins in them and set them on dry ground they look all right, but once they go into the rivers and lakes, into the wind and waves, are they not in danger? — Shambhala Publications

When I was a child, all problems had ended with a single word from my father. A smile from him was sunshine, his scowl a bolt of thunder. He was smart, and generous, and honorable without fail. He could exile a trespasser, check my math homework, and fix the leaky bathroom sink, all before dinner. For the longest time, I thought he was invincible. Above the petty problems that plagued normal people.
And now he was gone. — Rachel Vincent

Love to me is - the final lines in Dante's Paradiso, when he says, "The love that moves the Sun and all the stars" - it's what draws us together, it's why we have leaky margins with each other. It is that sumptuous, sensuous, sensitive quickening that happens when we really know ourselves as love and see ourselves as loving. — Jean Houston

Yes?' he asked, looking at me over the sheet.
'I'm a writer temporarily down on my inspirations.'
'Oh, a writer, eh?'
'Yes.'
'Are you sure?'
'No, I'm not.'
'What do you write?'
'Short stories mostly. And I'm halfway through a novel.'
'A novel, eh?'
'Yes.'
'What's the name of it?'
'"The Leaky Faucet of My Doom."'
'Oh, I like that. What's it about?'
'Everything.'
'Everything? You mean, for instance, it's about cancer?'
'Yes.'
'How about my wife?'
'She's in there too. — Charles Bukowski

[On the Netherlands:] There is not a richer or more carefully tilled garden spot in the whole world than this leaky, springy little country. — Mary Mapes Dodge

Sometimes I felt like the mundane details of our lives were the only things tethering me to the world. I could hold onto them - distractions necessitating action. They gave me a sense of purpose. If not for the leaky faucet, the sandwiches, the bills, I might not know what to do with my hands. — T. Greenwood