Paperweight Quotes & Sayings

He was like a paperweight, but less mobile. — Mary Jane Hathaway

One of my pet peeves was when an adult imagined they had to encapsulate Life for you, hand you Life in a jar, in an eyedropper, in a penguin paperweight full of snow-A Collector's Dream. — Marisha Pessl

I am not a fool. This is why Olga was so distraught - because I teetered the line, and most times my left foot was a paperweight clinging to hell. — Rebekah Armusik

When it costs you the same amount of manufacturing effort to make advanced robotic parts as it does to manufacture a paperweight, that really changes things in a profound way. — Hod Lipson

For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight. — Donald Hall

Ordinary society is like a paperweight on you: It won't allow you to fly. — Rajneesh

The ultimate change one can ever seek for is a change in thought. A change in thought is a change in body — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

This is the terrible thing girls like us have in common" she explained. "Parents, upbringings,lifestyles, that are painfully normal. Middle class."
It was almost amoral, being raised this way, she told me fiercely. We'd never really understand pain. And wasn't that the human condition? By shielding us from the real world, pressing their palms over our eyes during all the bad parts. our parents -our parents-were keeping us separate from humanity. We were something else entirely — Meg Haston

He couldn't say the words, had spent too long in Silence, but he'd learned other ways to speak. Taking the paperweight she'd knocked off her desk out of his pocket, he put it in her hands. It's fixed. As long as you don't mind more than a few scars. — Nalini Singh

When I was in high school, my mom gave me a paperweight. It was when I was going through my 'not that interested in doing homework or really working on anything' phase and the paperweight said "If you're not the lead dog, the view never changes." And that's sort of the same thing, if you're not always working to be in the front. — Amanda Schull

The fear of forgetting anything precious can trigger in us the wish to raise a structure, like a paperweight to hold down our memories. We might even follow the example of the Countess of Mount Edgcumbe, who in the late eighteenth century had a thirty-foot-high Neoclassical obelisk erected on a hill on the outskirts of Plymouth, in memory of an unusually sensitive pig called Cupid, whom she did not hesitate to call a true friend. — Alain De Botton

Stormgren had walked to his desk and was fidgeting with his famous uranium paperweight. He was not nervous - merely undecided. — Arthur C. Clarke

New Rule: Stop hitting on women at the dog park. Yes, we're talking to you, divorced guy with a ponytail. That better be a Milk-Bone in your pocket, because we're not glad to see you. Women come to the park to exercise their dogs, not to socialize with hounds. They wouldn't pick you up if they had a plastic bag on their hand. Although if you're determined to meet a woman at the dog park, here's a tip: Get a dog. — Bill Maher

What did you think the answer would be, Elisabeth? I toy with you because I can. Because it gives me great pleasure. Because I was bored. — S. Jae-Jones

The pills I take are a paperweight. All they do is pin the fantasies down. But they're still there, and any strong wind that comes along, I can feel them rattling around, trying to slip free. — Joe Hill

Knowledge will not always take the place of simple observation. — Arnold Lobel

He did it now, holding it up before his eyes as he had as a boy, and it did its old, old trick. Through the floating snow you could see a little gingerbread house with a path leading up to it. The gingerbread shutters were closed, but as an imaginative boy you could fancy that one of the shutters was being folded back (as indeed, one of them seemed to be folding back now) by a long white hand, and then a pallid face would be looking out at you, grinning with long teeth, inviting you into this house beyond the world in its slow and endless fantasy-land of false snow, where time was a myth. The face was looking out at him now, pallid and hungry, a face that would never look on daylight or blue skies again.
It was his own face.
He threw the paperweight into the corner and it shattered. He left without waiting to see what might leak out of it. — Stephen King

Here. Right here, right now bring your mind to this place and time. Invite it, even if it resists, to sit and witness what it is to be alive. Let there be no ulterior motive in this moment but to be. Rest on the waves of breath and choose to experience all of it. Let thoughts float through and leave again, as the mind slowly settles like snow inside a shaken paperweight. This is all there is. Here. Right here and now. — Richard Faulds

I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future. — Brian Eno

The camera has an interest in turning history into spectacle, but none in reversing the process. At best, the picture leaves a vague blur in the observer's mind; strong enough to send him into battle perhaps, but not to have him understand why he is going. — Denis Donoghue

I never wanted this," said Bastian, crouching over him. He brought the paperweight down again, into the center of Mason's face, feeling the bridge of his nose fracture under the blow. "I never said yes." He lifted his arm and brought it down again and again, and closed his eyes as the red liquid splattered over his face, dousing him in warmth. "You never gave me the chance." He didn't stop until Mason's twitching limbs fell still and his breath creased to froth through his ruined jaw. — Lisa Henry

The Pulitzer isn't a physical object. You can't hold it in your hand. You get some money ($7,500 in my day), and you get a little Tiffany's paperweight with your name on it and the image of Joseph Pulitzer suspended in the crystal. When people see my 'Pulitzer' (I keep it in my sock drawer), they are pretty amazed at its meagerness. — Jeffrey Eugenides

You get a promotion?"
"I got a polite, but firm suggestion to be a team player. [ ... ]"
"You got off easy. One of my commanding officers once threw a paperweight at me."
"We're a bit more subtle. — Nelson DeMille

He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain. It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear soft light in which one could see into interminable distances. — George Orwell

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing. — Ray Bradbury

The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal. — George Orwell

He looked at her with his green don't-lie-to-me-woman eyes and Scarlet dropped her guilty gaze to the mahogany desktop, searching around until she found a paperweight shaped like a pyramid to stare at. — Chelsea Fine

This knowledge sits in my heart, heavy as a paperweight. — Lemony Snicket

I consider Memphis to be a cultural center, and I think that if you put a giant redneck hub in the middle of it, you're going to dilute all of that," said Christian Dalton, 20, a worker at Real 2 Reel, an art gallery on the hip South Main Street. "But I think it's better than having a giant empty paperweight downtown. — Anonymous

Computers are good, but only while they are working. Otherwise, they are no more use than a paperweight — Farahad Zama

..."That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?" "Yes." Billy, in fact had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three lady bugs embedded in it. "Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is now why. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Even if you're a genius and you invent your own language, it doesn't become a language until there are people using it. — Eyvind Kang

I never realized before there were so many ways to die. So many ways to kill people. Why are there so many deadly weapons?"

Clapp rubbed his lip and looked down at her. "Listen, Miss Gilbert. I've come to figure that man is the only deadly weapon. Take a gun. It's an absolutely harmless thing - even makes a good honest paperweight - until some man gets his hands around it. You can strip a gun down to its basic parts and it's lost its power. You can reduce a man to his chemical elements, but you've always got the spirit of whatever you call it left. And that spirit will find some damned way to do evil. — Wade Miller

He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets. The problem comes in the hours when he isn't working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from the blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down. — Michael Chabon

Lies, fictions and untrue suppositions can create new human truths which build technology, art, language, everything that is distinctly of Man. The word "stone" for instance is not a stone, it is an oral pattern of vocal, dental and labial sounds or a scriptive arrangement of ink on a white surface, but man pretends that it is actually the thing it refers to. Every time he wishes to tell another man about a stone he can use the word instead of the thing itself. The word bodies forth the object in the mind of the listener and both speaker and listener are able to imagine a stone without seeing one. All the qualities of stone can be metaphorically and metonymically expressed. "I was stoned, stony broke, stone blind, stone cold sober, stonily silent," oh, whatever occurs. More than that, a man can look at a stone and call it a weapon, a paperweight, a doorstep, a jewel, an idol. He can give it function, he can possess it. — Stephen Fry

By the by," Stephen said, "what is the difference between a viscount and a stallion?"
Miss Marshall shook her head. "What is it?"
Stephen gave her a broad smile. "The first is a horse's arse. The second is an entire horse."
She buried her head in her hands. "No. You cannot distract me with terrible jokes. You are supposed to be looking up facts. Shoo!"
But Stephen didn't stop. "What's the difference between a marquess and a paperweight?"
"I'm sure you'll tell me."
"One of them can't do anything unless a servant helps it along. The other one holds down papers. — Courtney Milan