Rods Quotes & Sayings

Let us consider how great a commodity of doctrine exists in books; how easily, how secretly, how safely they expose the nakedness of human ignorance without putting it to shame. These are the masters who instruct us without rods and ferules, without hard words and anger, without clothes or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if investigating you interrogate them, they conceal nothing; if you mistake them, they never grumble; if you are ignorant, they cannot laugh at you. — Richard De Bury

Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Mediaevalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned upon the world, and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living, men could not understand Christ. — Oscar Wilde

I'd like to return to prose after a fifteen-year hiatus. An epistolary novella maybe. A man went into the mountains fifteen years ago to write the following letter to a woman: "Dear B., I'd like to strike you down with an iron rod. Maybe I love you. If you feel the same way and your wishes conform to mine, then please please get in touch with me posthaste. We'll discuss this matter together and make the necessary arrangements if everything works out. With warm wishes, Your Bernd." The letter is, however, never mailed and never written. In further letters to B. from Bernd, he pursues, among other things, the question: why? The last letter could be the one in which Bernd lets B. know that the matter has been settled since he has just been struck down by a group of women with iron rods. — Urs Allemann

Reading the features you would get the impression that this year's crop of rods will allow you to cast from here to eternity, with a rod so light you need to tie it to your wrist to stop it blowing away. — Tony Bishop

People tend to think of brain surgeons as being very dextrous," the neurosurgeon replied, "but it's the plastic surgeons and microvascular surgeons who do that meticulous stuff." He indicated the slide on the wall: a patient's brain with an aerial array of steel rods, clamps and wires. "The rest of us just go gardening. — Gavin Francis

Time is not a field, to be measured in rods, nor a sea, to be measured in miles; it is a heart beat. — Nikos Kazantzakis

The next evening she brought him the Royal. It was an office model from an era when such things as electric typewriters, color TVs, and touch-tone telephones were only science fiction. It was as black and as proper as a pair of high-button shoes. Glass panels were set into the sides, revealing the machine's levers, springs, ratchets, and rods. A steel return lever, dull with disuse, jutted to one side like a hitchhiker's thumb. The roller was dusty, its hard rubber scarred and pitted. — Stephen King

(wizards, even failed wizards, have in addition to rods and cones in their eyeballs the tiny octagons that enable them to see into the far octarine, the basic colour of which all other colours are merely pale shadows impinging on normal four-dimensional space. It is said to be a sort of fluorescent greenish-yellow purple). — Terry Pratchett

People in Japan and the Faeroe Islands kill dolphins and pilot whales by running steel rods into their spinal columns while they squeal in pain and terror and thrash in agony. (In Japan, it's illegal to kill cows and pigs as painfully and inhumanely as they kill dolphins.) The lack of compassion for dolphins and whales indicates that humans' "theory of mind" is incomplete. We have an empathy shortfall, a compassion deficit. And human-on-human violence, abuse, and ethnic and religious genocide are all too pervasive in our world. No elephant will ever pilot a jetliner. And no elephant will ever pilot a jetliner into the World Trade Center. We have the capacity for wider compassion, but we don't fully live up to ourselves. Why do human egos seem so threatened by the thought that other animals think and feel? Is it because acknowledging the mind of another makes it harder to abuse them? We seem so unfinished and so defensive. Maybe incompleteness is one of the things that "makes us human. — Carl Safina

would react with violent seizures. Because of the rudimentary working conditions, and the difficulty of correctly reproducing body parts in miniature, this body had been built using only parts from the biggest and fittest of cadavers. The straps were not sufficient to hold me. I tore free. Lightning was cascading through copper rods buried in my chest. I ripped them out. Elixir and blood were being pumped into my body by a machine. I smashed it. I roared like an animal as I began destroying the very tools that had brought me to life. The bellows were manned by one of Dippel's assistants. I remember him looking at me with an expression of terror as I picked him up by the neck. I killed my first man only ten seconds after I had been born. With blood and Elixir pouring from my self-inflicted wounds, I — Larry Correia

Leo gestured to the empty core. "The syncopator goes here. It's a multi-access gyro-valve to regulate flow. The dozen glass tubes on the outside? Those are filled with powerful, dangerous stuff. That glowing red one is Lemnos fire from my dad's forges. This murky stuff here? That's water from the River Styx. The stuff in the tubes is going to power the ship, right? Like radioactive rods in a nuclear reactor. But the mix ratio has to be controlled, and the timer is already operational."
Leo tapped the digital clock, which now read 65:15. "That means without the syncopator, this stuff is all going to vent into the chamber at the same time, in sixty-five minutes. At that point, we'll get a very nasty reaction."
Jason and Piper stared at him. Leo wondered if he'd been speaking English. Sometimes when he was agitated he slipped into Spanish, like his mom used to do in her workshop. But he was pretty sure he'd used English. — Rick Riordan

Most fishing rods work better if you grasp them at the thick end. If you grasp a fisherman at the thick end, you may get a thumb bit off. — Ed Zern

On this day, Eustace was heating iron rods to fix a broken piece on his antique mower. He had a number of irons cooking in his forge at the same time and, distracted by trying to teach me the basics of blacksmithing, he allowed several of them to get too hot, to the point of compromising the strength of the metal. When he saw this, he said, "Damn! I have too many irons in the fire."
Which was the first time I had ever heard that expression used in its proper context. But such is the satisfaction of being around Eustace; everything suddenly seems to be in its proper context. He makes true a notion of frontier identity that has long since passed most men of his generation, most of whom are left with nothing but the vocabulary. — Elizabeth Gilbert

And Siobhan says people go on holidays to see new things and relax, but it wouldn't make me relaxed and you can see new things by looking at earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of the solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness intersect at right angles. And I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly. And also, a thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of it being new. — Mark Haddon

Muggles have garden gnomes, too, you know," Harry told Ron as they crossed the lawn.
"Yeah, I've seen those things they think are gnomes," said Ron, bent double with his head in a peony bush, "like fat little Santa Clauses with fishing rods ... — J.K. Rowling

Reading wasn't an attempt to educate myself. It was my chief escape from a world that, although gorgeous in landscape and rich with mountain culture, didn't provide what I needed - the promise of adventure, a life beyond the perimeter of hills. I often fantasized that I'd been adopted and had mysterious powers such as flying or teleportation. Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within the pages of a novel, I was unafraid: of my father, of dogs, snakes, and the bully across the creek; of older boys who drove hot rods close enough to make me jump in the ditch; of armed men parked near the bootlegger. — Chris Offutt

See now, for a good blade, one that will not betray the man in battle, rods of hard and soft iron must be heated and braided together. Then is the blade folded over and hammered flat again, and maybe yet again, many times for the finest blades ... So the hard and soft iron are mingled without blending, before the blade is hammered up to its finished form and tempered, and ground to an edge that shall draw blood from the wind. So comes the pattern, like oil and water that mingle but do not mix. Yet it is the strength of the blade, for without the hard iron the blade would bend in battle, and without the soft iron it would break. — Rosemary Sutcliff

... the cylinder itself has only just begun its revolutions ... as it gathers speed the objects grouped around its fulcrum assume, collectively ... no ... as it gathers speed the whole intricate system of cords, weights, metal spikes and rods, brass plates engraved with labyrinthine patterns, bricks, scraps of fabric, paper, canvas, unmarked sheets ... the entire elaborate network of components begins to shudder into wild spasmodic motion, rattling almost farcically within the framework of the machine. — Martin Vaughn-James

We are all the children of Rome, without knowing it. Our months are called after Roman emperors or gods, our summer is July and August, named after Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar. When you people scream fascist at us, you are referring to the rods of authority called fasces by the Romans. The idea of law written down and to be observed equally comes to us from the Romans, and our alphabet comes to us exactly from the Roman. From plumbing to the idea that surrounding someone in battle gives victory, Rome gave them to us. Rome is our common, civilized roots, so deep that many of us in the West do not even realize it unless we are educated to it. Rome is our intellectual father, and we have been living off its remnants for two thousand years. — Richard Sapir

How can you need so many rods and reels to catch a fish? , she asked, her lips pulled into that weaned on a gherkin look, as she watched me prepare for a fishing trip. Probably for much the same reason that you seem to need 30 pairs of shoes for one pair of feet, I nearly said, but decided to live for another day. — Tony Bishop

So we have to make sure we stop it here," he said.
"Exactly. Well,you asked me to get you as close to the water as possible.I presume you have a plan?"
"My love,I always have a plan."
They heard footsteps rattling behind them and turned as Prometheus and Niten came hurrying up. They were both carrying fishing rods over their shoulders.The slender Japanese man grinned. "Do not ask him how much it cost to hire these," he said.
"How much?" Nicholas asked.
"Too much," Prometheus answered furiously. "I could have bought an entire fishing boat,or at least a very good fish dinner,for what it cost to rent them for a couple of hours," he grumbled. "Plus a deposit in case we don't bring them back."
"What's the plan?" Niten asked. He held out an empty bucket. "We can'nt really go fishing. We don't have bait."
"Oh,but we do." Nicholas smiled. "You are our bait. — Michael Scott

No, this is serious, Ollie. So I'm watching this spider building its web in the corner of the window. First it does the main parts, then the little connector rods. It's like so careful and precise, right? And then just when it's done, Mrs. Halverson comes over and says, 'It's so stuffy in here I can hardly breathe. Let's have some air,' and opens the window. And boom, all the spider's work was gone." He paused. "Made me think, man, that was just like life."
I touched his cheek. "What do you mean, silly boy?"
"You work and work, and all it takes is one bitch to ruin everything."
Ollie stared ahead steadily and said, "I think it shows that sometimes for one person to keep breathing, something else has to stop. — Michele Jaffe

The law proposed by Valerius forbade that anyone who had appealed should be scourged with rods or beheaded, but if the law was disregarded on either point it did no more than term it 'a wicked deed'. Such was the sense of shame amongst men at that time that this, I suppose, was thought to impose a legal sanction which would be sufficiently binding. Today hardly anyone would seriously utter such a threat. — Livy

Unlike the LeBrons and A-Rods of the world, anointed as special from pre-K, Matt Leinart exudes an approachability rarely seen in superstars. It's why kids on the autograph line chat him up like a buddy with whom they could stay up late playing Xbox. — Stephen Rodrick

Father and son had been on poor terms (even Cicero acknowledged this) and it was arranged for the young man to be accused of parricide. This was among the most serious offenses in the charge book and was one of the few crimes to attract the death penalty under Roman law. The method of execution was extremely unpleasant. An ancient legal authority described what took place: According to the custom of our ancestors it was established that the parricide should be beaten with blood-red rods, sewn in a leather sack together with a dog [an animal despised by Greeks and Romans], a cock [like the parricide devoid of all feelings of affection], a viper [whose mother was supposed to die when it was born], and an ape [a caricature of a man], and the sack thrown into the depths of the sea or a river. — Anthony Everitt

Tailor your space to your needs. In one closet, I have upper and lower rods for skirts, pants and tops. The second is all shelves for bags and linens. In the third, there's just one rod for suits and dresses. To hang evening gowns, I use hooks on the ceiling. — Thelma Golden

The middle class, in any society, plays the role of graphite rods in nuclear reactors: they slow down the reaction and, if it weren't for them, the reactor would explode. A society without a middle class is a society primed for explosion. — Ahmed Toufiq

I do not like punishments. You will never torture a child into duty; but a sensible child will dread the frown of a judicious mother more than all the rods, dark rooms, end scolding school-mistresses in the universe. — Henry Kirke White

Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes. — Theodor Reik

Then the long nights, that were also days, in the hospital. And the long blanks, that were also nights. Needles, and angled glass rods to suck water through. Needles, and curious enamel wedges slid under your middle. Needles, and - needles and needles and needles. Like swarms of persistent mosquitoes with unbreakable drills. The way a pincushion feels, if it could feel. Or the target of a porcupine. Or a case of not just momentary but permanently endured static electricity after you scuff across a woolen rug and then put your finger on a light switch. Even food was a needle - a jab into a vein ...
("For The Rest Of Her Life") — Cornell Woolrich

We camped for the night in a hollow near a good-sized creek - one big enough for trout. Jamie and Ian waded into this with enthusiasm, harrying the finny denizens with whippy rods cut from black willow. — Diana Gabaldon

Five feet. Four feet. Three. Two. Thomas knew he had no choice. He moved. Forward. He squeezed past the connecting rods at the last second and stepped into the Maze. The walls slammed shut behind him, the echo of its boom bouncing off the ivy-covered stone like mad laughter. — James Dashner

ELECTRICAL KITE To Peter Collinson [Philadelphia], Oct. 19, 1752. Sir, As frequent mention is made in public papers from Europe of the success of the Philadelphia experiment for drawing the electric fire from clouds by means of pointed rods of iron erected on high buildings, &c., it may be agreeable to the curious to be informed, that the same experiment has succeeded in Philadelphia, though made in a different and more easy manner, which is as follows: — Benjamin Franklin

It would be nice to think that the menacing aspects of North Korea were for display also, that the bombs and reactors were Potemkin showcases or bargaining chips. On the plane from Beijing I met a group of unsmiling Texan types wearing baseball caps. They were the 'in-country' team from the International Atomic Energy Agency, there to inspect and neutralize North Korea's plutonium rods. Not a nice job, but, as they say, someone has to do it. Speaking of the most controversial reactor at Yongbyon, one of the guys said, 'No sweat. She's shut down now.' Nice to know. But then, so is the rest of North Korean society shut down - animation suspended, all dead quiet on the set, endlessly awaiting not action (we hope) or even cameras, but light. — Christopher Hitchens

If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There was nothing unique about my beech tree, nothing difficult in its ascent, no biological revelation at its summit, nor any honey, but it had become a place to think. A roost. I was fond of it, and it
well, it had no notion of me. I had climbed it many times; at first light, dusk, and glaring noon. I had climbed it in winter, brushing snow from the branches of my hand, with the wood cold as stone to the touch, and real crows' nests black in the branches of nearby trees. I had climbed in in early summer, and looked out over the countryside with heat jellying the air and the drowsy buzz of a tractor from somewhere nearby. And I had climbed it in monsoon rain, with water falling in rods thick enough for the eye to see. Climbing the tree was a way to get perspective, however slight; to look down on a city that I usually looked across. The relief of relief. Above all, it was a way of defraying the city's claims on me. — Robert Macfarlane

So remarkably deaf was my grandfather Squeers That he had to wear lightning-rods over his ears To even hear thunder, and oftentimes then He was forced to request it to thunder again. — Bill Nye

Even in a less exaggerated description, any verbal account of a person is bound to find itself employing an assortment of waterfalls, lightning rods, landscapes, birds, etc. — Sergei Eisenstein

A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira's past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. — Italo Calvino

A good fisherman can secure many regenerative hours in winter, polishing up the rods and reels. — Herbert Hoover

When the rods were pushed back in and the clicking had died down, we suddenly experiences a let-down feeling, for all of us understood the language of the counter. Even though we had anticipated the success of the experiment, its accomplishment had a deep impact on us. For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant; still we could not escape an eerie feeling when we had actually done it. We felt as, I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knowns will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee. — Eugene Wigner

All this talk of folds and rods and buttons. Are we copulating or sewing draperies? — Tessa Dare

When I saw this Broken Kilometer, it reminded me of these 1,000 Buddhas. That piece is 1,000 one-meter gold rods, and this is 1,000 pieces of gold gilded wooden sculpture. In terms of design, it's up to the space's character. — Hiroshi Sugimoto

What's the big deal with Bejamin Frankin, anyway? I mean, so the guy invented electricity or whatever. That was hundreds of years ago."
He didn't invent electricity," Amy said, trying not to sound too annoyed."He discovered that lightning was the same stuff as electicity. He invented lightning rods to protect buildings and experimented with batteries and-"
I do that. Have you ever put one on your tounge? — Rick Riordan

As we look over the list of the early leaders of the republic, Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, and others, we discern that they were all men who insisted upon being themselves and who refused to truckle to the people. With each succeeding generation, the growing demand of the people that its elective officials shall not lead but merely register the popular will has steadily undermined the independence of those who derive their power from popular election. The persistent refusal of the Adamses to sacrifice the integrity of their own intellectual and moral standards and values for the sake of winning public office or popular favor is another of the measuring rods by which we may measure the divergence of American life from its starting point. — James Truslow Adams

She waited for so long that something strange happened. She started to be able to see. There wasn't any more light to see by. It was just that her eyes decided to give her more information. She'd been told in a lesson once about something called accommodation. The rods and cones of the eye, especially the rods, change their zone of sensitivity so that they can see details and distinctions in what previously looked like total darkness. But there are functional limits to that process, and the resulting picture is mostly black and white because rods aren't good at gradations of colour. This was different. It was like an invisible sun came up in the room, and Melanie could see by its light as well as she could see by day. Or like the space below her went from black ocean to dry land over the space of a few minutes. She wondered if this was something only hungries could do. She — M.R. Carey

Oh yeah, I mean, it wasn't a very good guitar, most good guitars have got thrust rods in the necks that you can adjust or that'll keep them in shape, you know keep them straight. This one just, well it turned into a bow and arrow after a couple of months. — Eric Clapton

But it's not just me, you know. The whole world's sad," I said. "It's like a virus. It's going to end badly. Glaciers melting, ozone depleted. Terrorists blowing up buildings, nuclear rods infecting the aqueducts. Influenza hopping from the pigeons to the humans, killing millions. Billions. People rotting in the street. The sun bursting open, shattering us eight minutes later. If not that, starvation. Cannibalism. Freakish mutated babies with eyeballs in their navels. It's a terrible place to bring a child into," I said. "This world. It is terrible. Just terrible." I — Lauren Groff

The Lord takes care of his own, but church trustees still put lightning rods on the steeple. — Evan Esar

Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ. — Oscar Wilde

After a while you'll think no thought the others do not think. You'll know no word the others can't say. And you'll do things because the others do them. You'll feel the danger in any difference whatever-a danger to the crowd of like-thinking, like-acting men ... Once in a while there is a man who won't do what is demanded of him, and do you know what happens? The whole machine devotes itself coldly to the destruction of his difference. They'll beat your spirit and your nerves, your body and your mind, with iron rods until the dangerous difference goes out of you. And if you can't finally give in, they'll vomit you up and leave you stinking outside
neither part of themselves, nor yet free ... They only do it to protect themselves. A thing so triumphantly illogical, so beautifully senseless as an army can't allow a question to weaken it. — John Steinbeck

Generally, we are united in the belief that all rod design has been progressive and that the ideas about fly rods in the past were so bad as to make it amazing that people were able to fish at all. — Thomas McGuane

The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link. The men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth. — Henry David Thoreau

When Enrico Fermi built the first nuclear reactor, he suspended the control rods from a rope tied to a balcony railing. In case something went wrong, next to the railing was stationed a distinguished physicist with an axe. This led to the probably apocryphal story that SCRAM stands for "Safety Control Rod Axe Man. — Anonymous

If you don't kill all of us all at once, those who remain will not be the weak.
It's the strong who remain, the bent but unbroken, like the iron rods that used to give this concrete its strength. — Rick Yancey

Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival; they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, Please strike here! — George Santayana

I've always loved old hot rods. I have four or five of them at home that I work on when I'm not working out. — Buddy Rice

The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned. — Steven Pinker

Do you want to kill his love for you? What sort of existence will he have if you rob him of the fruits of his ambition, if you take him from the splendour of a great political career, if you close the doors of public life against him, if you condemn him to sterile failure, he who was made for triumph and success? Women are not meant to judge us but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission. Why should you scourge him with rods for a sin done in his youth, before he knew you, before he knew himself? A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A women's life revolves around curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that man's life progresses. Don't make any terrible mistake, Lady Chiltern. A woman who can keep a man's love, and love him in return, has done all the world wants of women, or should want of them. — Oscar Wilde

Inspiration comes from somewhere else, and some people merely act as lightning rods for inspiration. There's nothing great about them. — Cockballs

Are we all just lightning rods for other people's destinies? Is that what it's all about — Anthony McDonald

I'm the kind of developer who likes to throw lightning rods around. To make a great program there's got to be at least one person at the center who is breathing life into it. In a ferocious way. — Andy Hertzfeld

Until they stood at last by a crumbling wall, looking up and up and still farther up at the great tombyard top of the old house. For that's what it seemed. The high mountain peak of the mansion was littered with what looked like black bones or iron rods, and enough chimneys to choke out smoke signals from three dozen fires on sooty hearths hidden far below in dim bowels of this monster place. With so many chimneys, the roof seemed a vast cemetery, each chimney signifying the burial place of some old god of fire or enchantress of steam, smoke, and firefly spark. even as they watched, a kind of bleak exhalation of soot breathed up out of some four dozen flues, darkening the sky still more, and putting out some few stars. — Ray Bradbury

Why, look you, I am whipp'd and scourg'd with rods,
Nettled and stung with pismires[nettles], when I hear
Of this vile politician, Bolingbroke. — William Shakespeare

As I followed the chief waiter with my eyes, I could not help thinking that the garden in which he had gradually blown to be the flower he was, was an arduous place to rise in. It had such a prescriptive, stiff-necked, long-established, solemn, elderly air. I glanced about the room, which had had its sanded floor sanded, no doubt, in exactly the same manner when the chief waiter was a boy - if he ever was a boy, which appeared improbable; and at the shining tables, where I saw myself reflected, in unruffled depths of old mahogany; and at the lamps, without a flaw in their trimming or cleaning; and at the comfortable green curtains, with their pure brass rods, snugly enclosing the boxes; and at the two large coal fires, brightly burning; and at the rows of decanters, burly as if with the consciousness of pipes of expensive old port wine below; and both England and the law appeared to me to be very difficult indeed to be taken by storm. — Charles Dickens

Lightning rods guarding some graves denoted dead who rested uneasily; stumps of burned-out candles stood at the heads of infant graves. It was a happy cemetery. — Harper Lee

from the ascending Berg blew across them as he ran over to the entrance of the building, its doors still open. Deedee clung to him and Trina was right by his side. They went through the entrance into a wide room with no furniture. Only a strange object right in the center - two metallic rods, standing tall, with a — James Dashner

Just about every weekend when I was growing up, we would throw rods and rifles and tents and shovels and pickaxes into the back of the truck and then head off to the side of a mountain or the bottom of a canyon. Hiking, fishing, hunting, rock-hounding: this is how my parents passed the time. — Benjamin Percy

Shut up," I said fiercely and very quietly because the sound of his voice sent sharp, arcing lightning rods of pain from my eyes all the way through my skull. — Patricia Briggs

Your Mama's so stupid"- Lassiter dematerialized and re-formed on the far side, spinning the rods- "she thinks a California dime is something you dial a phone with." ~ Lassiter

' The Shadows' page 11 — J.R. Ward

There is indeed no such thing in life as absolute darkness; one's eyes revolt and hasten to fill the vacuum by floating in sparks, dream patterns, figures whimsical and figures grotesque, shifting and clad in complementary colors, to appease the indignant cups and rods of the retina. — Gelett Burgess

It isn't true that the laws of nature have been capriciously disturbed; that snakes have talked; that women have been turned into salt; that rods have brought water out of rocks. — Arthur Conan Doyle

For years, I've had a hankering for the portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Duplessis. Franklin is credited with so many inventions: the postal system, lightning rods, the constitution. He was a rock star before there was such a thing. — Jon Bon Jovi

Reuben nails my fantasies everytime, with iron rods of reality. He asserts that I am going to die, but probably not for a while, and that maybe I should try getting married and having a life first. He is 70 and knows things, which is why I go to him. But it's sad to leave my romantic illusions at the door of this passage. Although false and destructive and useless, they've been tremendous company. — Suzanne Finnamore

The most unusual salesman I ever met is a fellow who made a modest fortune purveying lightning rods. But he suddenly lost interest in his work. He got caught in a storm with a bunch of samples in his arms. — Shelley Berman

A man can never have too many books. Neither can he have too many fountain pens, hats, fishing rods, waistcoats, tea caddies, paintings or whatever helps him to feel at home in his surroundings and communicate his personality to the world. — Fennel Hudson

The rod felt sleek and expensive in his hand; it was the Maserati of surf-casting rods. — Elin Hilderbrand

In the summer of that year two women were stripped and beaten with rods, their ears nailed to a wooden post, for having said that 'queen Katherine is the true queen of England — Peter Ackroyd

He snorted. "They were probably scared."
"Scared!" For some reason, that hurt, just a little. She felt her lower lip wobble. "I'm not that bad, am I?"
"Worse," he said cheerfully. "You're hell on wheels. You're just lucky I like hot rods — Linda Howard

The obstinate practicality of old women pierces and fortifies these families like the steel rods buried in walls of powdery concrete. — Barbara Kingsolver

All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now! — Jeffrey Eugenides

All the other kids in ninth grade were drawing hot rods and cocker spaniels and getting blue ribbons in art class. I was getting rejection slips from the 'Saturday Evening Post.' — Brad Holland

There had been no crises of incident, or marked movements of experience such as in Felipe's imaginations of love were essential to the fulness of its growth. This is a common mistake on the part of those who have never felt love's true bonds. Once in those chains, one perceives that they are not of the sort full forged in a day. They are made as the great iron cables are made, on which bridges are swung across the widest water-channels,
not of single huge rods, or bars, which would be stronger, perhaps, to look at; but myriads of the finest wires, each one by itself so fine, so frail, it would barely hold a child's kite in the wind: by hundreds, hundreds of thousands of such, twisted, re-twisted together, are made the mighty cables, which do not any more swerve from their place in the air, under the weight and jar of the ceaseless traffic and tread of two cities, than the solid earth swerves under the same ceaseless weight and jar. Such cables do not break. — Helen Hunt Jackson

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money.
If you approach them, they are not asleep; If you seek them, they do not hide;
If you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you. — Richard De Bury

Claire put scientifically enhanced popcorn in the microwave oven. "I never feel like I'm putting food in one of these things," she then says, entering with beeps, the time-set into the LED. "It feels more like I'm inserting fuel rods into a core. — Douglas Coupland

Improbable as it may be, the day still has a few indignities left. The day waters down indignity with frustration to make it last longer. Abomination, thy name is Subway. He cannot enter. They flood through turnstiles, hips banging rods, and will not let him enter. He must get home, but it's all he can do to get halfway in before another one charges at him. A fish out of school. Everybody knows how it works except for him. All of them from every floor are crammed into this one subway car: the makers of memos, the routers of memos, the indexers filers and shredders of memos, the always-at-their-desks and the never-around. How do they all fit. Squabbling like pigeons over stale crumbs of seats. Everyone thinks they are more deserving, everyone thinks their day has been harder than everyone else's, and everyone is correct. — Colson Whitehead

As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which do not freeze over, and I was surprised at its general regularity. In the deepest part there are several acres more level than almost any field which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plow. In one instance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty rods; and generally, near the middle, I could calculate the variation for each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand within three or four inches. Some are accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, — Henry David Thoreau

As government, and strong rods for the exercise of it, are necessary to preserve public societies from dreadful and fatal calamities arising from among themselves; so no less requisite are they to defend the community from foreign enemies. As they are like the pillars of a building, so they are also like the walls and bulwarks of a city: they are under God the main strength of a people in a time of war and the chief instruments of their preservation, safety and rest. — Jonathan Edwards

One year, on vacation in Hawaii, I was relaxing at a beach, watching whales in the distance, when a fisherman, obviously a local, drove up in his pick-up truck. He got out with a dozen fishing rods. Not one. A dozen. He baited each hook, cast all the lines into the ocean, and set the rods in the sand. Intrigued, I wandered over and asked him for an explanation. "It's simple," he said. "I love fish but I hate fishin'. I like eatin', not catchn'. So I cast out 12 lines. By sunset, some of them will have caught a fish. Never all of 'em. So if I only cast one or two I might go hungry. But 12 is enough so some always catch. Usually there's enough for me and extras to sell to local restaurants. This way, I live the life I want." The simple fellow had unwittingly put his finger on a powerful secret. The flaw in most businesses, that keeps them always in desperate need - which suppresses prices - is: too few lines cast in the ocean. — Dan S. Kennedy

Her blank eyes burrowed through the fetid air between herself and her visitor. They were without content; hollow pools of meaninglessness. They were not eyes, but voids sunk between two jutting pent-houses of bone and two bloodless hummocks of cheek. They suspended two raw rods of grief before their own immobility, like frozen fountains in a bright wintry air; and on these rods the fluttering rags of a futile grief were hung. — Stella Gibbons

A mobile is an abstract sculpture made chiefly out of sheet metal, steel rods, wire and wood. Some or all of these elements move, propelled by electric motors, wind, water or by hand. — Alexander Calder

Have seen no other effects in rods but to make children's minds more remiss or more maliciously headstrong. — Michel De Montaigne

This is a great opportunity for gear heads to celebrate the holiday, show off their hot rods and visit the aquarium. — Dick Miller

It is best to lay our plans widely in youth, for then land is cheap, and it is but too easy to contract our views afterward. Youths so laid out, with broad avenues and parks, that they may make handsome and liberal old men! Show me a youth whose mind is like some Washington city of magnificent distances, prepared for the most remotely successful and glorious life after all, when those spaces shall be built over and the idea of the founder be realized. I trust that every New England boy will begin by laying out a Keene Street through his head, eight rods wide. — Henry David Thoreau

I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound. - Carol Kennicott — Sinclair Lewis

But hearing and seeing only the bright hurry-gurdy carousel os his twirling thoughts, and the same hard little horses bobbing by on their braided rods. Here they came again. The outrage! The police! Poor Molly! Sanctimonious bastard! Call that a moral position? Up to his neck in shit! The outrage! And what about Molly ... ? — Ian McEwan

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights - any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi. — Henry David Thoreau

Paris. Reuters News Agency informs us that the gigantic and entirely useless structure of iron rods with which the French intend to astound visitors to the Fifteenth World Fair has finally been completed. This dangerous project is causing justified anxiety among the inhabitants of Paris. How can this interminable factory chimney be allowed to tower over Paris, dwarfing all the marvelous monuments of the capital with its ridiculous height? Experienced engineers express concern about whether such a tall and relatively slim structure, erected on a foundation only a third of its own height, is capable of withstanding the pressure of the wind. — Boris Akunin

The whirligig featured a drummer, a trumpet player, a clarinetist, and a man with a trombone. It was a leap beyond the spouting whale, with more figures, a six-bladed propeller, and a much more complex system of rods and pivots that made the instruments dip and rise as if the musicians were marching. — Paul Fleischman

One might have complained about the soot and ashes or about the pipes and curtain rods that hung crazily from the ceiling, but patients never lived in a hospital ward so nearly free of bacteria as this one that was sterilized by fire. — Michihiko Hachiya