Matchstick Quotes & Sayings

Wherever there is injustice, there is anger, and anger is like gasoline - if you spray it around and somebody lights a matchstick, you have an inferno. But anger inside an engine is powerful: it can drive us forward and can get us through dreadful moments and give us power. I learnt this with my discussions with nuclear policy makers. — Scilla Elworthy

For half an hour they poked about in a happy dusty dream, through the junk and broken furniture and ornaments. It was like reading the story of somebody's life, Jane thought, as she gazed at the tiny matchstick masts of the ship sailing motionless forever in the green glass bottle. All these things had been used once, had been part of every day in the house below. Someone has slept on the bed, anxiously watched the minutes on the clock, pounced joyfully on each magazine as it arrived. But those people were long dead, or gone away, and now the oddments of their lives were piled up here, forgotten. She found herself feeling rather sad. — Susan Cooper

Whether government finances its added spending by increasing taxes, by borrowing, or by inflating the currency, the added spending will be offset by reduced private spending. Furthermore, private spending is generally more efficient than the government spending that would replace it because people act more carefully when they spend their own money than when they spend other people's money. — Richard Wagner

Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. — Edward Hallett Carr

Joan Finch is tall and sickly thin. She is wearing a tight black dress that accentuates her bony legs, the crookedness of her body. She looks like a burnt matchstick. — Jerrod Edson

Two hands cut down a few trees, but one matchstick clears a forest. — Matshona Dhliwayo

We are compelled to choose," he sometimes complained, "between the savagery of Communism and the vulgarism of America. — Pearl S. Buck

If refined sense, and exalted sense, be not so useful as common sense, their rarity, their novelty, and the nobleness of their objects, make some compensation, and render them the admiration of mankind. — David Hume

A waft of sweet hash drifted by, and I wanted to float after it like Wimpy levitating at the scent of a hamburger. — Jerry Stahl

To Ejinar that cannonball was a monster with a will of its own. It showed him what war was: not a battery that exploded and sent matchstick soldiers fleeing, but a dragon that breathed hot fire on his naked heart. — Carsten Jensen

He pauses, swipes a matchstick on a column. It bursts into flame. "I tell you, you must take risks in my studio." He finds a cigarette behind his ear and lights it. "I tell you not to be timid. I tell you to make the choices, make the mistakes, big, terrible, reckless mistakes, really screw it all up. I tell you it is the only way." An affirmative murmur. "I say this, yes, but I still see so many of you afraid to cut in." He begins to pace, slowly like a wolf, which is definitely his mirror animal. "I see what you are doing. When you leave yesterday, I go from work to work. You feel like Rambo maybe with the drills, the saws. You make lots of noise, lots of dust, but very few of you have found even this much" - he pinches two fingers together - "of your sculptures. Today this changes." He walks over to a short blond-haired girl. "May I, Melinda?" "Please, — Jandy Nelson

You know, we don't have any decorative sprigs of rosemary; we're not placing little matchstick radishes onto an hors d'oeuvre ... The food's gotta taste good. The concept's gotta taste good. — Nadia Giosia

Only later I felt that poetry is like feeling another person lying next to you in the dark. Do you believe in poetry, in the spirit of poetry? I could see poetry in ballads, in the picture of the cathedral on the back of the postcard that my father sent my mother from London, in glaciers, peaks of mountains, river dust, Ian McEwan's covers of his books, cheap thrillers. Running gave me a gravitational pull. Running was my mother love. I was barefoot. There I was dressed in white. Matchstick legs. Hair standing up. I did not feel like a zero. I did not feel like a lost oar, unloved and unwanted, like a plant that needed water. A fleet of paper ships that needed to be mourned. I often felt homesick for the country of my mother. — Abigail George

I say you're in hell when you don't give to someone who needs, because you can't bear to have less. What you are giving away then is your own soul. You have to care for each other or you walk on cinders, a matchstick ready to be struck. — Joe Hill

O exhilaration, I thought. To be lifted up through the eye of chaos, to balance breath-stopped on the edge of nothing. And the plunge that would follow, the shattering of my matchstick body to smithereens, the bones flying free as foam, the heart finally released. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England. — Thomas B. Macaulay

I have no intention of watching undersized Englishmen perched on horses with matchstick legs race along courses planned to amuse Nell Gwynn. — Gilbert Harding

Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart! — J.K. Rowling

Until I was a teenager, I used red pokeberries for lipstick and a burnt matchstick for eyeliner. I used honeysuckle for perfume. — Dolly Parton

Watching Larkin's efforts, Rearden felt what he did when he watched an ant struggling under the load of a matchstick. It's so hard for him, thought Rearden, and so easy for me. — Ayn Rand

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves. — Alain De Botton

The Mania Speaks


You clumsy bootlegger. Little daffodil.
I watered you with an ocean and you plucked one little vein?
Downed a couple bottles of pills and got yourself carted off to the ER?
I gifted you the will of gunpowder, a matchstick tongue, and all you managed
was a shredded sweater and a police warning?
You should be legend by now.
Girl in an orange jumpsuit, a headline.
I built you from the purest napalm, fed you wine and bourbon.
Preened you in the dark, hammered lullabies into your thin skull.
I painted over the walls, wrote the poems. I shook your goddamn boots.
Now you want out? Think you'll wrestle me out of you with prescriptions?
A good man's good love and some breathing exercises?
You think I can't tame that? I always come home. Always.
Ravenous. Loaded. You know better than anybody:
I'm bigger than God. — Jeanann Verlee

I don't smoke but I keep a match box in my pocket, when my heart slips towards sin, I burn the matchstick and heat my palm with it, then say to myself, "Ali you can't even bear this heat, how would you bear the unbearable heat of hellfire?" — Muhammad Ali

If any good comes out of the current famine in the Horn of Africa - amidst the pictures of mothers carrying dying babies at their shrivelled breasts and hollow-eyed children with swollen bellies and matchstick limbs - it will be galvanising the world on the need to ensure access to nutritious food for the world's most vulnerable people. — Josette Sheeran

Once upon a teenage mistake, Ash thought he was in forever love, the kind of love that started wars and built the Taj Mahal. He knew at that moment how wrong he'd been. Without his even realizing it, Ash had fallen for Fee, harder and faster than he'd ever fallen for anyone. This was the love he'd thought he'd had before, but there was no real comparison between the two. It was like putting a
matchstick beside a raging inferno - one of them would be completely consumed. — Piper Vaughn

They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers. — Michael Lewis

Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain what it has all been for. We swallow the operating system with our mother's milk and sleepwalk into the forest of consumer illusion craving shoes, houses, cars, magazines, experiences that endorse our preconceived dreams and opinions. We grow into our parents. We becomes clones, robots, matchstick men thinking and saying the same, feeling the same, behaving the same, appreciating in books and films and art shows those things we already recognize and understand. — Chloe Thurlow

You had every right to be. He raised his eyes to look at her and she was suddenly and strangely reminded of being four years old at the beach, crying when the wind came up and blew away the castle she had made. Her mother had told her she could make another one if she liked, but it hadn't stopped her crying because what she had thought was permanent was not permanent after all, but only made out of sand that vanished at the touch of wind and water. — Cassandra Clare

Don't fight the waves. Dive under, bob up, or catch the curl and ride the wave. The ocean is stronger than you; you might as well be a matchstick in comparison. But if you yield to the waves, they carry you, their power becomes you. ~ Elizabeth Cunningham — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek