Shearing Quotes & Sayings

The way it works: The orchestra plays a few selections of its own and I terminate the first part of the programme on piano, usually with a movement from a Mozart concerto. — George Shearing

Her hand reached up and took a strand of his hair between her fingers. "Simple as that."
She gently pulled on that curl and let it go. "It's so springy."
They'd barely grazed at the truth, but I she was satisfied - and distracted. By his hair, of all things.
"I feel like a sheep that has been overlooked during spring shearing," he murmured.
"Yes, adorably fluffy."
Another time he might have protested the use of that adjective. But now he was all too relieved. "Would you like me to pull my chair closer, so you may fondle my hair with greater ease?" he asked.
She beamed at him. "Why, yes, I'd like exactly that. — Sherry Thomas

When people ask me how is it I was a musician, I facetiously say that I'm a firm believer in reincarnation and in a previous life I was Johann Sebastian Bach's guide dog. — George Shearing

You know, when you've established a certain thing, what can you do? You're stuck with it. — George Shearing

I was born in London in 1919. I first went to America in 1946 for a three-month holiday. Then I came back, worked here for almost a year sold up my home and went back on immigration in 1947. — George Shearing

Can anybody be given a great degree of creativity? No. They can be given the equipment to develop it-if they have it in them in the first place. — George Shearing

I always tell people, it took me 10 minutes and 35 years in the business. I get tired of playing it ["Lullaby of Birdland"], but not of collecting the royalties. — George Shearing

We're travelling for about nine-and-a-half months a year. — George Shearing

The depression was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World Money powers, triggered by the planned sudden shortage of supply of call money in the New York money market ... The One World Government leaders and their ever close bankers have now acquired full control of the money and credit machinery of the U.S. via the creation of the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank. — Curtis Bean Dall

Earl had let Bertie off the porch for some fresh grass and I didn't want Dr. Eustace to see her. She still looked as though we'd put Hannibal Lecter in charge of her shearing and had hired the special effects team from Night of the Living Dead to bandage her. — Susan Juby

Having a set, popular formula does inhibit you. — George Shearing

And God did not just ask for the perfect sheep; He also wanted its wool. Deuteronomy 18:4 instructs shepherds to give the first shearing of the sheep as on offering to God. Above the crackling warmth radiating from the stove, I read the verse aloud to Lynne. "Is a first shearing a once-in-a-lifetime offering?" I asked. "Yes, everybody wants the first shearing, especially if it's from one of your best lambs. The first shearing is the finest fleese that's used to the best clothes ... to ask for that is a real sacrifice." ... For the first time in a long while, maybe ever, I had felt with my own hands what God desired from sacrifice. It was nothing like what I expected ... In asking for the first fleece, God isn't asking for the biggest. He wants to smallest and the softest. He doesn't want more-He wants the best." -Scouting the Divine — Margaret Feinberg

I'd rather not deal with such questions, because anyway it's like shearing a pig - lots of screams but little wool. — Vladimir Putin

Because the dog was after her, Poor Cat Fright. As I was going up Pippin Hill, Pippin Hill was dirty, There I met a pretty miss, And she dropped me a curtsey. Early to bed, and early to rise, Is the way to be healthy, wealthy, and wise. Old woman, old woman, shall we go a-shearing? Speak a little louder, sir, I am very thick o' hearing. Old woman, old woman, shall I kiss you dearly? Thank you, kind sir, I hear very clearly. The Cuckoo's a bonny bird, She sings as she flies, She brings us good tidings, And tells us no lies. She sucks little birds' eggs, To make her voice clear, And never cries "Cuckoo!" Till spring-time of the year. — Harrison Weir

We can't all be lions in this world. There must be some lambs, harmless, kindly, gregarious creatures for eating and shearing. — William Makepeace Thackeray

Sometimes life offers you up that kind of dichotomy, that soul-shearing rift of two very different things happening at once. — Lish McBride

Teddy Wilson, I think, said a little while ago that it's much easier to come in and play whatever comes into your mind, without obeying any of the laws of bass line and harmony and so on. — George Shearing

Beautiful like all the Shadowhunters were beautiful, like moonlight shearing off the edges of broken glass: lovely and deadly. Beautiful things, cruel things, cruel in that way that only people who absolutely believed in the rightness of their cause could be cruel. — Cassandra Clare

I studied with a blind teacher from about 5 until I was 16, at two different schools. From the age of 12 until 16, I was in a boarding school-which, I believe, at that time was compulsory for blind children. — George Shearing

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a spectulator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. — Henry David Thoreau

I hadn't learned to decipher the mysterious ways of the undermind, How occasionally it erupts into an avalanche of clarity, a sheet of snow shearing off the roof and thundering to the ground, leaving the shingles exposed, knowledge issuing a messenger to announce its arrival. — Kate Bolick

Loving the Hands

I could make a wardrobe
with tufts of wool
caught on thistle and bracken.

Lost - the scraps
I might have woven whole cloth.

"Come watch," the man says,
shearing sheep
with the precision of long practice,
fleece, removed all of a piece,
rolled in a neat bundle.

I've been so clumsy
with people people who've loved me.

Straddling a ewe,
the man props its head on his foot,
leans down with clippers,
each pass across the coat a caress.

His dogs, lying nearby,
tremble at every move - as I do,
loving the hands that have learned
to gentle the life beneath them. — Julie Suk

Hey," he said.
"Hi." Oh, damn. It was awkward.
"What're you doing?"
"Shearing a sheep. It's cold outside, and I need a new hat."
He paused. "You're joking, right?"
"Yes, Marshall." I gnawed on my fingers some more and sunk back in my chair. — Chanelle Gray

My father was a sheep shearer, so I grew up in a caravan; we'd go around from shearing shed to shearing shed. My mother always wanted us to be educated, so I went to a school. — Jason Clarke

They set forth in a crimson dawn where sky and earth closed in a razorous plane. Out there dark little archipelagos of cloud and the vast world of sand and scrub shearing upward into the shoreless void where those blue islands trembled and the earth grew uncertain, gravely canted and veering out through tinctures of rose and the dark beyond the dawn to the uttermost rebate of space. — Cormac McCarthy

Can anybody be given creativity? No. Only equipment to develop it if it's in them in the first place. — George Shearing

If you establish an identity, you build a monster-and thats right, youve got to live with it. Of course, you can enjoy it, too. — George Shearing

In Braille you write your flat sign first and then your note. — George Shearing

I don't like freedom jazz - I think it's void of roots and void of foundation. — George Shearing

He killed, his sword shearing, shield and horse a ram, pushing in, and further in, opening a space by force alone for the momentum of the men behind him. Beside him a man fell to a spear in the throat. To his left, an equine scream as Rochert's horse went down.
In front of him, methodically, men fell, and fell, and fell.
He split his attention. He swept a sword cut aside with his shield, killed a helmed soldier, and all the while flung out his mind, waiting for the moment when Touar's lines split open. The most difficult part of commanding from the front was this
staying alive in the moment, while tracking in his mind, critically, the whole fight. Yet it was exhilarating, like fighting with two bodies, at two scales. — C.S. Pacat

I don't think you can contrive any sound. — George Shearing

He is not drowning His sheep when He washeth them, nor killing them when He is shearing them. But by this He showeth that they are His own: and the new-shorn sheep do most visibly bear His name or mark; when it is almost worn out and scarce discernible on them that have the longest fleece. — Richard Baxter

I looked. George Shearing. And as always he leaned his blind head on his pale hand, all ears opened like the ears of an elephant, listening to the American sounds and mastering them for his own English summer's-night use. Then they urged him to get up and play. He did. He played innumerable choruses with amazing chords that mounted higher and higher till the sweat splashed all over the piano and everybody listened in awe and fright. They led him off the stand after an hour. He went back to his dark corner, old God Shearing, and the boys said, 'There ain't nothin left after that. — Jack Kerouac

It must happen to us all ... We pack up what we've learned so far and leave the familiar behind. No fun, that shearing separation, but somewhere within, we must dimly know that saying goodbye to safety brings the only security we'll ever know. — Richard Bach

My affiliation with England is borne out by the fact that I do come back for periodic visits. — George Shearing

In my childhood there was every year at my old home, Roxborough, or, as it is called in Irish, Cregroostha, a great sheep-shearing that lasted many days. On the last evening there was always a dance for the shearers and their helpers, and two pipers used to sit on chairs placed on a corn-bin to make music for the dance. — Lady Gregory

Learn the rules and then break them in such a way as to exercise good taste. — George Shearing

She skidded around a corner, slamming her shoulder into the wall and bouncing off of it without slowing.

Caleb?

Silence. Forty-six meters. A long stretch of hallway. She pushed faster, harder. Twenty meters.

She burst into the room in unison with a deafening crash of metal shearing metal. — G.S. Jennsen

In levying taxes and in shearing sheep it is well to stop when you get down to the skin. — Austin O'Malley

I haven't written an awful lot recently, but I think I probably will start again very shortly. Being so much on the road, when you have a couple of weeks off, you're likely to avoid sitting at the piano, and taping, and giving yourself more work to do. — George Shearing

Joliffe knew their audience was with them when Christ declared at the money-changers, "You knaves! You thieves and rascals! Defaming the Lord God's honor as you do! Making his house into a den of thieves and taking what is not yours to take, like shepherds never shearing but butchering every sheep!" and among the lookers-on heads turned and some people pointed at Father Hewgo standing at his church door, glaring, his arms tightly folded aross his chest, well apart from it all but making sure his disapproval lowered over everything. Joliffe had not written the lines at him but might as well have because his parishioners surely saw a match; there was even scattered laughter that would do nothing to soften him toward the players. — Margaret Frazer

When Hank Jones had his night off, I would get somebody to take my place as intermission pianist and I'd play the show with Ella, so I would get a chance to play with Ray Brown and Charlie Smith as well. — George Shearing

Today, most women are surrounded by ingenious gadgets. They don't grow the peas or raise the chicken that they serve for dinner; instead they hunt and gather in the grocery store. They go through catalogs or department stores to buy clothes instead of shearing sheep, carding wool, and weaving cloth for skirts and coats and blankets. — Helen Fisher

Perfect retention. I don't think I could do that-I've never disciplined myself to do it. I suppose a lot of it is a question of discipline. Which improvisation is not. — George Shearing

I think in certain areas the demand is greater than it has ever been, and my business is better than it's been in 30 years. The music business is so precarious, as you know-you've got to make it while you can make it, and that's exactly what we're doing. — George Shearing

I think it was Duke Ellington who once said that we're always most pleased with our current record. I mean, you have to assume that you learn from one, and you do something better next time. — George Shearing

All my musical foundations go back to the age of 3. My family tell me that I used to listen to the old crystal set, then go to the piano and pick out the tune that I just heard. — George Shearing

And the simple people are trash. A herd of sheep that are good for shearing, but sometimes it's more profitable to slaughter them. — Sergei Lukyanenko

I loved when my dad was home. He liked to sit in the living room and watch boxing and baseball on TV. Or he'd be tinkering around or listening to records by his musician buddies - George Shearing, Oscar Peterson and the Jackie Gleason Orchestra. — Natalie Cole