Oval Quotes & Sayings

Japan Air's orbital terminus was a white toroid studded with domes and ringed with the dark-rimmed oval openings of docking bays. — William Gibson

The Oval Office is a place where there's been, obviously, a lot of amazing experiences over a seven-and-a-half year period. My presidency is one where I've had to make some very tough decisions. I guess some presidencies are kind of - were real smooth, there were no real big issues. Well, that's not the way mine is. — George W. Bush

Chris Christie won by such a wide margin that pundits say this will give him the impetus he needs to run for president. And he's got a new slogan: 'Put the oval in the Oval Office.' — Jay Leno

The seemingly omnipresent storm clouds hanging over the Constitution often make it hard to find a silver lining. Every day, the front page of The Drudge Report is littered with stories of government assaults on our civil liberties - from local government officials all the way up to the Oval Office. — Bob Barr

Hillary Clinton was actually inducted into the Irish American Hall of Fame yesterday. Hillary said she's very proud of her Irish heritage or her Italian heritage or her Asian heritage. Whatever it takes to seal the deal with you guys. I've got to get into that Oval Office. — Jimmy Fallon

I have a routine for a day I'm in the office and not really physically active. Or a day when I'm in the gym once or in the gym twice. Then I've got a road course routine and an oval routine because they're different physically. — Charlie Kimball

brushed with the first crimson of sunrise. On the oval track the comb marks of the rakes in the dirt showed no footsteps; Saul always ran better on fresh earth. He stripped and tossed — James Cannon

For all the folks whose job it was to be ready for [Hurricane] Katrina, but who weren't, from the Oval Office, right down the chain of command to the New Orleans police department, Wal-Mart was a vivid reproach. — Charles Fishman

I've worked for four presidents and watched two others up close, and I know that there's no such thing as a routine day in the Oval Office. — Dick Cheney

Slowly my body grows a single sound, slowly I become a bell, an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire
poesia Metamorfosi, I. Luna — Derek Walcott

One out of forty American men wears women's clothing. We've had more than forty presidents. One of these guys has been dancing around the Oval Office in a prom dress. — Allison Janney

I don't know that anything would be any good anywhere, so it's hard to gauge if this is better or worse, you know what I mean?" "Like: This place is miserable and I want to die, but I can't think of any place I'd rather be," I offered. He turned and stared at me, blue eyes mirroring the oval pool. "That's exactly what I mean." Get used to it, I thought. — Gillian Flynn

Bush made a point of emphasizing to me that unlike his father's administration, his was one of significant "walk-in access" to the Oval Office. — Robert Draper

I'll get to the oval three hours beforehand and warm up for about 45 minutes off the ice. Then I'll stretch and get on the ice for 20 minutes. I'll cool down, then relax, close my eyes and think about what I need to do. — Brittany Bowe

It was a perfectly beautiful night, as fall nights are in Washington. I walked out of the president's Oval Office, and as I walked out, I thought I might never live to see another Saturday night. — Robert McNamara

The president and I sat down in the Oval Office, and he expressed very clearly that what he wants from me is my best professional military advice. — David Petraeus

Dantes had entered the Chateau d'If with the round, open, smiling face of a young and happy man, with whom the early
paths of life have been smooth. and who anticipates a future corresponding with his past. This was now all changed. The oval face was lengthened, his smiling mouth had assumed the firm and marked
lines which betoken resolution; his eyebrows were arched beneath a brow furrowed with thought; his eyes were full of melancholy, and from their depths occasionally sparkled gloomy fires of misanthropy and hatred; his complexion, so long kept from the sun, had now that pale color which produces, when the features are encircled with black hair, the aristocratic beauty of the man of the north; the profound learning he had acquired had besides diffused over his features a refined intellectual expression; and he had also acquired, being naturally of a goodly stature, that vigor which a frame possesses which has so long concentrated all its force within itself. — Alexandre Dumas

All six of them sat on either side of the long oval conference table, strung out like strong, handsome beads on the string of my love. — Laurell K. Hamilton

The cave floor rumbled. A large stone emerged from the dirt-a smooth, oval rock exactly the same size and weight as a baby god ... She wrapped the stone in swaddling clothes and gave the real baby Zeus to the nymphs to take care of ... She marched right up to King Cannibal and shouted, This is the best baby yet! A fine little boy named, uh, Rocky! — Rick Riordan

War is party-blind. It doesn't care who is in the Oval Office. The forces that drive us to war don't care whether it's Republican, Democrat, or other. The fact is, these parties are prey to special interests. That is something Eisenhower was afraid of. — Eugene Jarecki

I have an oval-shaped scar on the knuckle of my right index finger from crashing my hand through a light fixture while practicing Elvis Presley moves in college. — Peter Lerangis

God is going to take over the White House ... He is going to take over the Oval Office ... because it belongs to Him and He is going to bring all things summed up into the fullness of Christ. He is going to take that Supreme Court. He is going to turn that inside out. He is going to pray that strong man off that thing and He is going to bring the synergistic anointing of intercession and the prophetic anointing to break, to judge, to decree ... I will march into that place and declare a decree the word of the Lord boldly ... He is joining the kingly and the priestly anointing. — Dutch Sheets

I picked up my volume of Collected Stories and Poems by Edgar Allen Poe. I sprawled across the bed and flipped through the pages until I came to one of my favorite short stories: "The Oval Portrait. — Crystal Smith Gordon

One opal cloudlet in an oval form reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm which in a distant valley has been staged for we are most artistically caged. — Vladimir Nabokov

Clinton is a big personality who has led a big life, and for some of the media conventional wisdom to boil it down to a view that 'all people are really interested in' are a few moments of madness in the Oval Office gets him, the importance of the presidency, and the significance of his life, all wrong. — Alastair Campbell

Breath. "You're welcome," he said tersely. "That man, Sims," she continued, worried. "The day you fired him, John said that he had a mean temper and that he carried a loaded rifle everywhere with him. You ... you be careful, okay?" She heard the soft expulsion of breath. He moved a step closer, his lean hands lifting her oval face to his. She could see the soft glitter of his blue eyes in the faint — Diana Palmer

You really have to experience the feeling of being with the president in the Oval Office ... It's a disease I came to call Ovalitis. — John The Apostle

The car drives through, stops while the man closes and fastens the prickly gate behind it. The bell shuts off; the stillness is deafening by contrast. The car goes on until the outline of a house suddenly uptilts the searching headlight-beams, log-built, sprawling, resembling a hunting-lodge. But there's no friendliness to it. There is something ominous and forbidding about its look, so dark, so forgotten, so secretive-looking. The kind of a house that has a maw to swallow with - a one-way house, that you feel will never disgorge any living thing that enters it. Leprous in the moonlight festering on its roof. And the two round sworls of light played by the heads of the car against its side, intersecting, form a pear-shaped oval that resembles a gleaming skull. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

It's striking that so many of the great economic initiatives of the Clinton presidency led eventually to catastrophe. But what really makes this story poisonous is that liberals by and large convinced themselves for many years that nothing had gone wrong at all. Everything Clinton's team had done was an act of professional-class consensus. Because most of the fuses lit by Clinton and Co. didn't actually detonate until after he had left office - and by then some science-denying Republican was in the Oval Office - they found it easy to absolve the Democrat from blame. When — Thomas Frank

Sitting in the Oval Office, beneath a painting of George Washington, with a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. over his right shoulder and a bust of Abraham Lincoln over his left shoulder, Obama told 'National Journal' that the country's economic woes are deep and endemic. — Ron Fournier

Steamy day, and though the windows of the oval study were open, the room was oppressively hot. You know Captain Henry, of course, Admiral? His boy's just gotten his wings at Pensacola. — Herman Wouk

Promise me, Roxie," he said again. The way he said her name - low and slow and sweet - was like nothing she'd ever heard. She could feel his eyes on her in such a way it was as if he was tracing the oval of her face with his fingers. And all her halfhearted talk of leaving turned to ashes. "I promise. — Laura Frantz

A seafaring uncle had given it to her mother who in turn had bequeathed it to Marilla. It was an old-fashioned oval, containing a braid of her mother's hair, surrounded by a border of very fine amethysts. — L.M. Montgomery

This Room
The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.
We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here. — John Ashbery

Jupiter was a chilly, dark and unfriendly tract of land in which no hope lingered, only despair. There she woke up in an oval dungeon. — J.M.K. Walkow

No one reaches the Oval Office without a great deal of admiration for the institution - and himself - so it's unsurprising that sitting presidents favor the biographies of former presidents. — Anthony Marra

Hillary Clinton said she hopes America is ready for a woman in the Oval Office. That was the great thing about her husband Bill: he was always ready for a woman in the Oval Office. — Jay Leno

Clinton's attempt to socialize healthcare was the second most disgusting thing he did in the oval office. I can't remember was the first thing was. — Ann Coulter

I don't understand why, to rise to the level of being president of my country, one has to be a monster. I used to say that George Bush was defiling the Oval Office, but it's been held by a long line of monsters. We don't have to support our administrations to love our country. — Cindy Sheehan

I would love to play the President. Give me the suit, give me the power, give me the oval office. That would be really fun. — Patrick Fabian

Balloons
Since Christmas they have lived with us, Guileless and clear, Oval soul-animals, Taking up half the space, Moving and rubbing on the silk Invisible air drifts, Giving a shriek and pop When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling. Yellow cathead, blue fish
Such queer moons we live with Instead of dead furniture! Straw mats, white walls And these traveling Globes of thin air, red, green, Delighting The heart like wishes or free Peacocks blessing Old ground with a feather Beaten in starry metals. Your small Brother is making His balloon squeak like a cat. Seeming to see A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it, He bites, Then sits Back, fat jug Contemplating a world clear as water. A red Shred in his little fist. — Sylvia Plath

While the darkness of the interior concealed her body, the streetlight behind them illuminated the pale oval of her face, gilding her cheeks in shades of amber and ghostly blue. The effect was . . . arresting. Vermeer had used natural light to paint women in this way, faces emerging from the shadows, forcing the viewer's eye to focus on what was most important: the look of grace. The mouth firmed in determination. The eyes poised to behold a revelation. — Meredith Duran

Neil and Buzz, I am talking to you by telephone from the Oval Office at the White House, and this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made ... Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man's world. As you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to Earth. — Richard M. Nixon

I felt I'd earned the Good Housekeeping Seal when I designed an oval-shaped spaghetti pot, because spaghetti is long. — Rachael Ray

The moments that followed were full of interest. A stillness, a brooding, expectant stillness, fell upon the company - and it numbered a round dozen - about Lord Gervase's richly appointed board. In the soft candlelight the oval table — Rafael Sabatini

The Port Elizabeth ground is more of a circle than an oval. It's long and square. — Trevor Bailey

I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickenson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael's "Two Sleepy People", Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High and Rising", and "You Got the Silver" by the Rolling Stones ... What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes. — Sarah Vowell

This guy [Donald Trump] has not offered a single serious policy proposal, which is important if you want to be president of the United States.And Hillary Clinton is going to have clear shot to the Oval Office. And so I think there are many out there that are rooting for that outcome, so that he's the nominee. And you can see it in the coverage he's gotten. — Marco Rubio

The walk-in privilege, to walk into the Oval Office and have a conversation with the president, is not something that everybody gets. — Josh Earnest

I know my dear brother, President [Barack] Obama, has a bust of Martin King right there in the Oval Office, but the question is are is he going to be true to who that Martin Luther King, Jr., actually is? King was concerned about what? The poor. He was concerned about working people. He was concerned about quality jobs. He was concerned about quality housing. He was concerned about precious babies in Vietnam, the way we ought to be concerned about precious babies in Afghanistan and precious babies in Tel Aviv and precious babies in Gaza. — Cornel West

The banked oval tracks are obsolete tracks for Indy cars. — Mario Andretti

All art is relationships, all art. Design is relationships. Design in a relationship between form and content ... Your glasses are round. Your collar is diagonal. These are relationships. Your mouth is an oval. Your nose is a triangle - this is what design is. — Paul Rand

Thanks to the oval I have discovered the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical. — Georges Braque

Truman's farewell address on January 15, 1953, delivered five days before he left the renovated White House, is to this day one of the best speeches of the Cold War, containing insightful analysis and a prediction of how, decades later, it would end. "I suppose that history will remember my term in office as the years when the 'Cold War' began to overshadow our lives," he told the American people, speaking late at night from the Oval Office. Winning the Cold War wouldn't be easy - or fast - but the United States, he firmly believed, would win simply by holding the line. — Garrett M. Graff

Her features were dainty, her small slender wrists climbed up to become the delicate shoulders that beckoned him. Her skin was like peach-tinted cream and he need not have touched her to experience the melting softness of her body. Her perfectly oval face was austere and her manner a little haughty. Her expressions had delicacy as well as a particular strength that did not abate her femininity. It seemed that the world had stopped. Her voice sounded like a melody and she looked like a dream, an illusion, up close and personal. — Faraaz Kazi

I lost it in the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet, I started to panic when I noticed the graveyard of empty toilet paper rolls. The brown cylinders had ostensibly been placed vertically to form a half oval on top of the flat shiny surface of the stainless steel toilet paper holder. It was like some sort of miniature-recycled Stonehenge in the women's bathroom, a monument to the bowel movements of days past. Actually, it was sometime around 2:30 p.m. when my day exited the realm of country song bad and entered the neighboring territory of Aunt Ethel's annual Christmas letter bad. Last year Aunt Ethel wrote with steady, stalwart sincerity of Uncle Joe's gout and her one - no, make that two - car accidents, the new sinkhole in their backyard, their impending eviction from the trailer park, and Cousin Serena's divorce. To be fair, Cousin Serena got divorced every year, so that didn't really count toward the calamitous computation of yearly catastrophes. I — Penny Reid

THERE IS A GAS LEAK IN THE BASEMENT OF THE SCHOOL. THERE IS NO NEED TO PANIC. IT IS JUST A GAS LEAK WHICH MAY LEAD TO AN EXPLOSION AT ANY MOMENT. PLEASE ALL GO TO THE OVAL, AS PER THE FIRE DRILLS.
-Charlie on the P.A. — Jaclyn Moriarty

His [Luke]letter went something like this: "Dear Mr President, Thank you for introducing me to the Hall of Famers and for showing me the Oval Office. I think if I work really hard I will have a chance for both."
The next time I saw the president I told him about my son's ambitious plans. His response was beautiful: "Never get between a boy and his dreams — Tim Russert

- I'm a believer in universal brotherhood, said Temple, glancing about him out of his dark oval eyes. Marx is only a bloody cod. — James Joyce

I am all for charity in judging the men who have occupied the Oval Office over the past seventy years, given the huge responsibilities the president carries across the world. — Nigel Hamilton

She was dark-haired, fierce; she wore two drop earrings made of crystal; her face was a pure oval tickled with dimples; her skin was golden; and her laugh was like a fire in the night. But on her face you could also read the concentration of a soul whose life is entirely inward, and a mischievous gravity which acquires a silver patina with age. — Muriel Barbery

I want you to know what I have told Australia's Parliament in Canberra - what I told General Petraeus in Kabul - what I told President Obama in the Oval Office this week. Australia will stand firm with our ally the United States. — Julia Gillard

From the day he first walked through the door of the Oval Office, President Obama's top priority has been growing our economy, creating good jobs, and rebuilding middle class security. — Denis McDonough

Caricatures created by politics never fit comfortably into the Oval Office. — David K. Shipler

Former president Bill Clinton was elected on this very day in 1992. Clinton went on to leave quite a mark in the oval office ... You mean the one on the sofa? — Craig Ferguson

Even those who saw only a part of the country witnessed so much that was new to them - the vast deltas, the astonishingly eroded limestone peaks, the sand-dune coastal forests, the forest mosaics and savannalike grassland. Many wrote home with vivid descriptions of the flora and fauna, the countless species they had never seen before. Many commented on the sheer luster of the place, of the seemingly infinite number of shades of green, in the rice paddies, the grasses, the palms, the rubber trees with their green oval leaves, the pine trees on faraway hills. — Fredrik Logevall

I think soon after I became director of the CIA - President Obama pulled me into the Oval Office and said: 'Look, I just want you to know that your top priority is to go after Osama bin Laden.' — Leon Panetta

We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren't there. — P. J. O'Rourke

U.S. Presedent Barack Sadam Husene Obame sit in the darkened Oval Ofice at 2 a.m. wearing hes traditienel Kenyan roabe.
He take one last bite of the Chicago style deep dish pizza that he has flown to him every day on the Amerecan tax payer's dime and wipe the grease off his mouth with the U.S. consititutien.
He get up and walk to desk, where he keeps the Kenyan black magic crystle ball. Its black glow iluminate his face.
"Eeny, meeny, miney, mo - which basic U.S. freedoms are next to go?" he say aloud to no one and every one at the same time.
Then he flash that trade mark Bary Obame million doller grin as a crack of lightning sound in the distence. — Seinfeld 2000

He drove the car back through the night to Paris. The hedges and orchards of Normandy flew past him. The moon hung oval and large in the misty sky. The ship was forgotten. Only the landscape remained. The landscape, the smell of hay and ripe apples, the silence and the deep peace of the inevitable — Erich Maria Remarque

Was it against the law to vomit in the Oval Office? — Julie Ann Walker

Her forehead, so high and oval, reminded him of how Shakespeare was supposed to look. He was not certain how to put this to her. — Ian McEwan

You just couldn't wait to get me naked, could you, Princess?" Loki asked tiredly. I started to pull my hand back, but he put his own hand over it, keeping it in place.
"No, I - I was checking for wounds," I stumbled. I wouldn't meet his gaze.
"I'm sure." He moved his thumb, almost caressing my hand, until it hit my ring. "What's that?" He tried to sit up to see it, so I lifted my hand, showing him the emerald-encrusted oval on my finger. "Is that a wedding ring?"
"No, engagement." I lowered my hand, resting it on the bed next to him. "I'm not married yet."
"I'm not too late, then." He smiled and settled back in the bed.
"Too late for what?" I asked.
"To stop you, of course." Still smiling, he closed his eyes. — Amanda Hocking

Ah, hissed Neeve, plump but strangely elegant as she sat beside Blue on the wall. Blue was struck again, as she had been struck the first time she'd met Neeve, by her oddly lovely hands. Chubby wrists led to soft, child-like palms and slender fingers with oval nails. — Maggie Stiefvater

Electing clean-energy leaders into the Senate, the House, and the Oval Office - and getting it done in the next few years - is the only real solution to climate stabilization at acceptable levels. — Eban Goodstein

I have more engagement with New Zealand than people might think. Unlike the impression I have of the American president, who sits in the Oval Office and people come to them. — John Key

I got a lot of Ph.D.-types and smart people around me who come into the Oval Office and say, 'Mr. President, here's what's on my mind.' And I listen carefully to their advice. But having gathered the device, I decide, you know, I say, 'This is what we're going to do.' — George W. Bush

Sometimes a face could be so simple: even a couple of dark spots on a lighter surface or a dark oval in the distance might be a face. An electrical socket could be a face, a mailbox or a couple of punctuation marks could congeal suddenly into something with an expression. Our faces, on the other hand, were made of hundreds of different parts, each part separate and tenuous and capable of being ugly, each part waiting for a product designed to isolate and act upon it. — Alexandra Kleeman

The day will come - and it is not far off - when the legacy of Lincoln will finally be fulfilled at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, when a black man or woman will sit in the Oval Office. When that day comes, the most remarkable thing about it will be how naturally it occurs. — George H. W. Bush

The unknown has undone many a president, and no matter the popularity of an Oval Office occupant, any and all presidents are vulnerable. Of course, one thing that seems to set Obama part from his recent predecessors is his ability to keep an inner calm about tough issues. — Chuck Todd

Knew the moment I saw you, standin' outside the shop, scared, that you were an innocent little thing. So sweet. So good." He lowered his head to take my chin between his teeth. "You got no idea what it's like for you to give me your trust, Ritz. If I was a good man I'd tell you to find somebody better, somebody that won't lose their shit over an asshole eye fuckin' you." His tongue traced the oval shape of my chin. "But I'm not a good man, and I'm gonna take everythin' you want to give me and everythin' you don't. — Mariana Zapata

I don't know what I expected, but my first morning in the Oval Office had a surprising ring of familiarity to it. It reminded me a lot of my job as governor. — Ronald Reagan

See, one of the interesting things in the Oval Office - I love to bring people into the Oval Office - right around the corner from here - and say, this is where I office, but I want you to know the office is always bigger than the person. — George W. Bush

I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office and foreign policy matters with war on my mind. — George W. Bush

When the president offered me this job, he told me that if there were situations in which I needed to speak to him or I needed his advice or I needed to ask him a question, that I could go into the Oval Office and I could ask him. — Josh Earnest

SHORTLY AFTER Louis Freeh was sworn in as the fifth director of the FBI on September 1, 1993, he turned in his White House pass. He refused to enter the Oval Office. His reasons were pure and simple. Freeh regarded President Clinton not as commander in chief but as the subject of a criminal case. The — Tim Weiner

Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds. — Michael Ondaatje

I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office.
(Washington DC, 12 May, 2008) — George W. Bush

There's always something new with sex. We lived in a world without Viagra, now we live in a world with Viagra. We lived in a world without blowjobs and anilingus in the Oval Office, and then it happens and you get to write about it. We live in a world where now the government is screwing with contraception and holding back vaccines that could save 4,000 women's lives a year, and you get to write about that. It's not as much fun as anilingus in the Oval Office, but what are you going to do? If you pay attention, there's always something new, and it's always really invigorating. — Dan Savage

I always jest to people, the Oval Office is the kind of place where people stand outside, they're getting ready to come in and tell me what for, and they walk in and get overwhelmed in the atmosphere, and they say, man, you're looking pretty. — George W. Bush

Anyone who can be cool about his first visit to the Oval Office has lost so much body heat that rigor mortis is probably about to set in. — David Frum

Grass Fires"
No ease for the boy at his keyhole,
his telescope,
when the women's white bodies flashed
in the bathroom. Young, my eyes began to fail.
In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother's coffin
Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL
The corpse
was wrapped like panetone in Italian tinfoil
Father's death was abrupt and unprotesting.
His vision was still twenty-twenty.
After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,
his last words to Mother were:
"I feel awful."
He smiled his oval Lowell smile ...
It has taken me the time since you died
to discover you are as human as I am ...
If I am. — Robert Lowell

I pray daily, and I pray in all kinds of places. I mean, I pray in bed, I pray in the Oval Office. I pray a lot. And just different as the spirit moves me. And faith is an integral part of my life. — George W. Bush

The Ford Motor Co. should stand for something more than cars and trucks. There is a Ford way of doing things that we cannot lose ... We need to be continuously polishing that Ford oval. — William Clay Ford Jr.

A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact that the milk van had been reversing. — Arundhati Roy

My first glimpse of the Adelaide Oval was given through the Victor Richardson Gates and up the ramp, and there it spread out before me, a green oasis. It was like another world opening up. — Barry Nicholls

An airplane crossed the sky, and she imagined its interior-people packed in rows like eggs in a carton, the chemical smell of the toilets, pretzels in foil pouches, cans hiss-popping open, black oval of night sky embedded in the rattling walls. How strange that something so drab, so confined, so stifling with sour exhalations and the fumes of indifferent machinery might be mistaken for a star. — Maggie Shipstead

Then there was war in heaven. But it was not angels. It was that small golden zeppelin, like a long oval world, high up. It seemed as if the cosmic order were gone, as if there had come a new order, a new heavens above us: and as if the world in anger were trying to revoke it. — John Milton

We need a president who will lead with a stronger, more consistent foreign policy. We also need our commander in chief to put more faith in military leadership who have all of the combat experience. It's bad policy to try to micromanage too much operationally and tactically from a desk in the Oval Office. — Lee Zeldin

Dorian Gray listened, open-eyed and wondering. The spray of lilac fell from his hand upon the gravel. A furry bee came and buzzed round it for a moment. Then it began to scramble all over the oval stellated globe of the tiny blossoms. He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some though that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield. — Oscar Wilde