Line That Divided Quotes & Sayings

He didn't care that he'd be punished. Punishments always came to an end eventually. [Felix] — Karen Maitland

As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible — Colin Wilson

When you push your stroller past a group of elderly women, you'll see in the turning gladness of their bodies a glimpse of the children they had been, turning toward the tin music of the ice cream van. — Beth Ann Fennelly

Now picture the suspenders attached to a pair of sweatpants. This vision is what first led me to coin the term camel balls. — Chelsea Handler

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine. — Wallace Stegner

On the equator, where centrifugal forces are greatest, a 150-pound person will be a slender 149 pounds 14 ounces. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The specialist serves as a striking concrete example of the species, making clear to us the radical nature of the novelty. For, previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned , for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his speciality; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a scientist," and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with an the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line. — Ortega Y Gasset

In managing our transport systems, our governments must constantly negotiate the paradox of mass movement. They must create a system which, for the sake of speed and efficiency, treats us like a herd, constantly prodded and coralled, divided, re-formed and forced into line. At the same time it must grant us the illusion of autonomy. — George Monbiot

The fact that you have a policy of such consequence directly affecting millions of people and you have a legal question of great consequence about the scope of the president's authority to act in implementing the immigration laws in this way and you have a one-line decision from the court affirming by an equally-divided court, it's an inevitable consequence of where we are. — Donald Verrilli Jr.

She took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?
that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made. — Virginia Woolf

In Sumter and other counties [in South Carolina] the whites are resorting to intimidation and violence to prevent the colored people from organizing for the elections. The division there is still on the color line. Substantially all the whites are Democrats and all the colored people are Republicans. There is no political principle in dispute between them. The whites have the intelligence, the property, and the courage which make power. The negroes are for the most part ignorant, poor, and timid. My view is that the whites must be divided there before a better state of things will prevail. — Rutherford B. Hayes

There was something about him where he stood all by himself under the trees and the stars, on the edge of the streetlight's glow in the darkness, that was symbolic of many men and women, not alone in this Sac Prairie, but in all the Sac Prairies of the world, something which spoke, out of that pathetic, ludicrous figure, of the spiritual isolation of so many people, something which made the thoughtful onlooker to wonder what thin line divided him from that other, knowing perhaps that the distance of chance or Providence was less great than the few steps separating one from the other in that darkness. — August Derleth

Once compulsory systems of state-run schools were established, they became increasingly standardized, both in content and in method. For the sake of efficiency, children were divided into separate classrooms by age and passed along, from grade to grade, like products on an assembly line. The task of each teacher was to add bits of officially approved knowledge to the product, in accordance with a preplanned schedule, and then to test that product before passing it on to the next station. — Peter Gray

Epitaph for a dead waiter - God finally caught his eye. — George S. Kaufman

Such was the mistrust of the official line, so heavy was the spin, that with any new piece of information you learned to do a kind of mental arithmetic whereby you divided the information given by the speaker's rank, multiplied by his or her time in-country, and subtracted based on the number of miles the speaker was distant from the fighting.

From The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground — David J. Morris

Work for god, love god alone, and be wise with god. When an ordinary man puts the necessary rime and enthusiasm into meditation and prayer, he becomes a divine man. — Paramahansa Yogananda

I was an ugly kid; when I was born, after the doctor cut the cord, he hung himself. — Rodney Dangerfield

Become loving and become courageous. Become the inspiration which you seek outside. Bring the metaphorical heart of your limbic system in sync with the analytical powerhouse of the prefrontal cortex. From your mind shall rise the inspiration. From your mind shall rise the love. From your mind shall rise the greatest education of all. — Abhijit Naskar

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

I move between San Francisco and Paris ... I have a wonderful beach house in California. — Danielle Steel

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both. — Vaclav Havel

The clock is Shandy's first symbol: under its influence, he is conceived and his misfortunes begin, which are the same thing according to this sign of time. Death is hidden in clocks, as Belli said, along with the unhappiness of individual life, of this fragment, of this thing that is divided, disintegrated, deprived of wholeness - death, which is time, the time of individuation, of separation, the abstract time that rolls toward its end. Tristram Shandy doesn't want to be born because he doesn't want to die. Any means, any weapon, can be used to save oneself from death and time. If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fatal, inescapable points, then digressions lengthen that line - and if these digressions become so complex, tangled, tortuous, and so rapid as to obscure their own tracks, then perhaps death won't find us again, perhaps time will lose its way, perhaps we'll be able to remain concealed in our ever-changing hiding places. These — Italo Calvino

He has always had a dread of crossing borders, he doesn't like to leave what's known and safe for the blank space beyond in which anything can happen. Everything at times of transition takes on a symbolic weight and power. But this too is why he travels. The world you're moving through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided any more, this stands for that, weather for mood, landscape for feeling, for every object there is a corresponding inner gesture, everything turns into metaphor. The border line on a map, but also drawn inside himself somewhere. — Damon Galgut

It is impossible to describe the shock of return. I recall that I stood for the longest time staring at a neatly painted yellow line on a neatly formed cement curb. Yellow yellow line line. I pondered the human industry, the paint, the cement truck and concrete forms, all the resources that had gone into that one curb. For what? I could not quite think of the answer. So that no car would park there? Are there so many cars that America must be divided into places with and places without them? Was it always so, or did they multiply vastly, along with telephones and new shoes and transistor radios and cellophane-wrapped tomatoes, in our absence? — Barbara Kingsolver

To take a dislike to a young man, only because he appeared to be of a different disposition from himself, was unworthy the real liberality of mind — Jane Austen

To illustrate to the Indians the advantages the white race had in the telephone I divided a body of warriors from Sitting Bull's camp into two parties and had them talk to each other over the telephone line. — Nelson A. Miles

My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn't be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number. — James Arthur

I looked at her without a word. She held an edge of the beach towel in each hand, pressing the edges against her cheeks. White smoke was rising from the cigarette between her fingers. With no wind to disturb it, the smoke rose straight up, like a miniature smoke signal. She was apparently having trouble deciding whether to cry or to laugh. At least she looked that way to me. She wavered atop the narrow line that divided one possibility from the other, but in the end she fell to neither side. May Kasahara pulled her expression together, put the towel on the ground, and took a drag on her cigarette. The time was nearly five o'clock, but the heat showed no sign of abating. — Haruki Murakami

One of the most intensely unlikeable figures of the twentieth century, fanatical anti-Semite, enemy of labour unions and proud recipient of medals from Nazi Germany, where Hitler held him in veneration, Henry Ford was also an employer who paid his workers more than his competitors, an innovator who pioneered the assembly line and a visionary whose part in the creation of the twentieth century was so great that Aldous Huxley, in his Brave New World, prefigured a society whose calendar was divided into BF and AF-Before Ford and After Ford. — Stephen Fry

The creek at night under the moon was just enough like the creek in daylight to be reassuring. There was the deadfall spruce that sieved the current with skeleton branches, churning a line of pale foam. There was the long pool above, a dark mirror of tree shadows and beacon moon. There were the gravel bars, chalky, shaped to the banks and swept into low moraines that divided the water. There the sky, softened as if by a thin fog of moonlight, filling the canyon. For a moment I forgot my preoccupation with the dark and drove up the road with that awe I felt before certain paintings in certain museums, the awe in which I disappeared. — Peter Heller

Where the principle of difference [between political parties] is as substantial and as strongly pronounced as between the republicans and the monocrats of our country, I hold it as honorable to take a firm and decided part and as immoral to pursue a middle line, as between the parties of honest men and rogues, into which every country is divided. — Thomas Jefferson