Quotes & Sayings About Shuffling

There was something about clowns that was worse than zombies. (Or maybe something that was the same. When you see a zombie, you want to laugh at first. When you see a clown, most people get a little nervous. There's the pallor and the cakey mortician-style makeup, the shuffling and the untidy hair. But clowns were probably malicious, and they moved fast on those little bicycles and in those little crammed cars. Zombies weren't much of anything. They didn't carry musical instruments and they didn't care whether or not you laughed at them. You always knew what zombies wanted.) — Kelly Link

We need to stop shuffling service parts randomly and set our sights on a goal, something we are moving toward in every service element. — James MacDonald

So, uh," I said, shuffling from one foot to the other, "want to go with me to check up on Obliteration? If you're not doing anything else important, I mean."
She cocked her head. "Did you just invite me on a date ... to spy on a deadly Epic planning to destroy the city?"
"Well, I don't have a lot of experience with dating, but I've always heard you're supposed to pick something you know the girl will enjoy ... "
She smiled. "Well, let's get to it then. — Brandon Sanderson

There was a loud shuffling above. A line of redcoats took their position at the edge of the ravine and aimed down at the rebels.
"Present!" the British officer screamed to his men.
"Present!" yelled the American officer. His men brought the butts of their muskets up to their shoulders and sighted down the long barrels, ready to shoot and kill.
I pressed my face into the earth, unable to plan a course of escape. My mind would not be mastered and thought only of the wretched, lying, foul, silly girl who was the cause of everything.
I thought of Isabel and I missed her.
"FIRE! — Laurie Halse Anderson

I am fat with love! Husky with ardor! Morbidly obese with devotion! A happy, busy bumblebee of marital enthusiasm. I positively hum around him, fussing and fixing. I have become a strange thing. I have become a wife. I find myself steering the ship of conversations- bulkily, unnaturally- just so I can say his name aloud. I have become a wife, I have become a bore, I have been asked to forfeit my Independent Young Feminist card. I don't care. I balance his checkbook, I trim his hair. I've gotten so retro, at one point I will probably use the word pocketbook, shuffling out the door in my swingy tweed coat, my lips red, on the way to the beauty parlor. Nothing bothers me. Everything seems like it will turn out fine, every bother transformed into an amusing story to be told over dinner. 'So I killed a hobo today, honey ... hahahaha! Ah, we have fun — Gillian Flynn

Charles Chaplin makes a million dollars a year out of a funny, shuffling walk and a pair of baggy trousers, because he does "something different." Take the hint and "individualize" yourself with some distinctive idea. — Napoleon Hill

Extremely unlikely events occur every moment and it is not a priori unthinkable that the evolution of life should be due to mere chance than that a particular order in a pack of cards should result from mechanical shuffling. — Leszek Kolakowski

The free world is shuffling into a psychological bondage whose chains are mostly of our own making. — Mark Steyn

Into the mercy seat I climb My head is shaved, my head is wired And like a moth that tries To enter the bright eye I go shuffling out of life Just to hide in death awhile And anyway I never lied. — Nick Cave

I can feel her there, mingled into the mud of a hundred other ghosts, some shuffling and harmless, others full of rage. I can't imagine what it is to be dead; it's a strange idea to me, having known so many ghosts. It's still a mystery. I don't quite understand why some people stay and others don't. I wonder where those who leave have gone. I wonder if the ones that I kill go to the same place. — Kendare Blake

The lights of Knoxville quaked in a faint penumbra to the west as must the ruins of many an older city seen by herders in the hills, by barbaric tribesmen shuffling along the roads. — Cormac McCarthy

Reorganization to me is shuffling boxes, moving boxes around. Transformation means that you're really fundamentally changing the way the organization thinks, the way it responds, the way it leads. It's a lot more than just playing with boxes. — Louis V. Gerstner Jr.

Em. Are you the Loch Ness Monster?" Archie stuttered shuffling back a step.
"Aghhh! M, M, Monster. Monster." Gordon shrieked, he turned his huge body and run further down the cavern to a boulder no more than six feet tall in the center, Gordon hid behind it. — Mark A. Cooper

This was a cruel trick of the mind, yes, but Teddy had long ago accepted the logic of it - waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without a history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present. What — Dennis Lehane

Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever. — William Carlos Williams

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever. — Richard Dawkins

His sophomore Creative Writing class was as silent as a room full of teenagers could be, only whispering and shuffling a little as they tried to complete their papers. This wasn't one of the "easy A" electives, and he usually got the kids who were serious about the idea of being better writers. Half of them just wanted to get better so they could improve their Pacific Rim hurt/comfort fanfic, but there was nothing wrong with that. Besides, one of them had let slip that a good portion of the class was posting on Archive of Our Own, and he'd spent a few nights with a beer in his hand, learning more about his students. He hadn't read the NC-17 pieces - there were professional limits - and yet he felt he respected them more as writers because he'd seen what they were capable of when they weren't being graded. — Seanan McGuire

Downstairs, I could hear the return of a long-lost sound: Amy making breakfast. Banging wooden cupboards (rump-thump!), rattling containers of tin and glass (ding-ring!), shuffling and sorting a collection of metal pots and iron pans (ruzz-shuzz!). A culinary orchestra tuning up, clattering vigorously toward the finale, a cake pan drumrolling along the floor, hitting the wall with a cymballic crash. — Gillian Flynn

Some days I wonder how I'll get through a whole lifetime of thinking. A life that's just words, words, words, shuffling around in my head. Was I born that way? — Rachel Klein

What no one tells you is that when someone you love dies, you lose them twice. Once to death, the second time to acceptance, and you don't walk that long, dark passage between the two alone. Grief takes every shuffling, unwilling step with you, offering a seductive bouquet of memories that can only blossom south of sanity. You can stay there, nose buried in the petals of the past. But you're never really alive again. — Karen Marie Moning

Hot dogs and Communion at the Hope Rescue Mission. I will always think of the body of Christ now with this scene in mind. Doctors and housewives and professors in nice shoes and brightly colored sweaters shuffling to the table together with men and women who hadn't changed clothes for days or weeks. The sophisticated smell of after-shave mixed with the sharp scent of dirty socks and stale smoke. People whose lives seemed all together sharing the same loaf with people whose lives were broken and tattered. We were all one body, for we all ate from the same loaf. — Leonard J. Vander Zee

The carpet is too soft. Also the palm tree in the lobby is unbelievable. For a long time the Maitre looks at our faces, shuffling passports in his hands. "Such dark-ringed eyes, such dark-ringed eyes. I knew a merchant from Smyrna, who also had a false front tooth. Nowadays one has to be terribly careful: informers and scorpions are everywhere."

In the elevator we stand facing the mirror, but already at the first jerk we see silvery mildew in the place of our faces. — Zbigniew Herbert

I stood for almost an hour in a line of shuffling, bitter - eyed late mailers (Christmas is such a carefree, low - pressure time - that's one of the things I love about it), ... — Stephen King

Waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present. — Dennis Lehane

All the others knew that he had a mind, knew that he was capable of understanding ideas. What will new people think when they see me? They'll see a body that's already atrophying, hunched over; they'll see me walk with a shuffling gait; they'll watch me use my hands like paws, clutching a spoon like a three-year-old; they'll hear my thick, half-intelligible speech; and they'll assume, they'll know, that such a person cannot possibly understand anything complicated or difficult. — Orson Scott Card

After my shower, I found him shuffling cards he bought at the convenience store we stopped at before the hotel. Grinning, I sat across from him.
"You told me that you're good at cards," Judd said, recalling my reaction to passing a casino on the drive.
"I said I liked cards. I never claimed to be good."
"The only people who like cards are gambling addicts and those who are good at it. You're not an addict."
"Do you like cards?" I asked while he dealt.
"Sure."
"Do you like me?" I asked softly, looking over my cards.
Judd never looked up from his hand. "I'm playing cards, ain't I? — Bijou Hunter

He went, ever on the move, with the slow, shuffling step of wandering beggars who are nowhere at home. — Stijn Streuvels

Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn't come back with a cartful and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time. — Wallace Stegner

Workable solutions for Earth are urgently needed. Saving seals and tigers, or fighting yet another oil pipeline through a wilderness area, while laudable, is merely shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. — Lawrence Anthony

OK, boss, I don't mind shuffling, but I won't scratch my head. — Ruby Dee

I always figured we were born to fly, one way or other, so I couldn't stand most men shuffling along with all the iron of the earth in their blood. I never met a man who weighed less than nine hundred pounds. — Ray Bradbury

I think Robert F. Kennedy really, finally, cared; he realized that all of the rhetoric had to be put down into some form of action. That's perhaps the reason they killed him. They don't care what you say, you can say as much as you want to, provided you don't do anything. If you start to do something and your shuffling raises too much dust, they will disestablish you. That's what happened to Martin Luther King. — Marlon Brando

It is wonderful to see persons of sense passing away a dozen hours together in shuffling and dividing a pack of cards. — Joseph Addison

Curious, sometimes, how one's thoughts seemed to swing in a kaleidoscope. It happened to me now. A bewildering shuffling and reshuffling of memories, of events. Then the mosaic settled into its true pattern. — Agatha Christie

We in the west think of unpredictability as a menace, something to be avoided at all costs. We want our careers, our family lives, our roads, our weather to be utterly predictable. We love nothing more than a sure thing. Shuffling the songs on our iPod is about as much randomness as we can handle. But here is a group of rational software engineers telling me that they like unpredictability, crave it, can't live without it. I get an inkling, not for the first time, that India lies at a spiritual latitude beyond the reach of the science of happiness. At — Eric Weiner

Shuffling really isn't something you should be doing on your deathbed. — Michael Ian Black

I found myself face to face with a long line of people resembling extras off the set of Night of the Living Dead: shuffling along, pale and twitching, empty cups in hand
murderous. Miserable. No matter that the air was rich with vapors of fresh-ground beans and warm muffins; no matter that the soft piped-in Vivaldi poured over us like steamed milk. These angry zombies were rushing to work, and their eyes flashed fair warning: Don't mess with us. We haven't had our coffee. — Joan Frank

When you enter a beloved novel many times, you can come to feel that you possess it, that nobody else has ever lived there. You try not to notice the party of impatient tourists trooping through the kitchen (Pnin a minor scenic attraction en route to the canyon Lolita), or that shuffling academic army, moving in perfect phalanx, as they stalk a squirrel around the backyard (or a series of squirrels, depending on their methodology). — Zadie Smith

I won't put in a load of laundry, because the machine is too loud and would drown out other, more significant noises - namely, the shuffling footsteps of the living dead. — David Sedaris

She breathed deeply of the freedom she found in Mattie's presence. Here she had no choice but to be herself. The carefully erected decoys she was constantly shuffling and changing to fit the situation were of no use here. Etta and Mattie went way back, a singular term that claimed co-knowledge of all the important events in their lives and almost all of the unimportant ones. And by rights of this possession, it tolerated no secrets. — Gloria Naylor

To try to make men equal by altering social arrangements is like trying to make the cards of equal value by shuffling the pack. — James Fitzjames Stephen

So like--imagine each person is a unit, and each unit makes so many decisions in a day, and each decision takes each unit in so many directions, it seems kind of silly to think we'd never run into one another, you know? Especially considering units tend to cluster and linger."

"Consider this. You're flying in the sky, not in a plane, but with your arms and hands. Like a miraculous bird. You're thousands of feet above the earth, drifting through the night. The red lights are in constant motion, blinking, shuffling between buildings and trees and houses. Old ones disappear, new ones are born. Over time, you notice the lights bump into one another occasionally. Are you surprised?"

I shook my head. "No."

"I call it the inevitability of corresponding units. — David Arnold

At last they heard the sound of slow shuffling footsteps approaching the door from the inside. It seemed, as the Mole remarked to the Rat, like some one walking in carpet slippers that were too large for him and down at heel; which was intelligent of Mole, because that was exactly what it was. — Kenneth Grahame

We can talk about republican or democratic approaches to the economy, but until you fix the student loan bubble - and that's where the real bubble is - and the tuition bubble, we don't have a chance. All this other stuff is shuffling deck-chairs on the Titanic. — Mark Cuban

I try to give the music more of a campfire feel as opposed to a library atmosphere. I like when you can hear people hanging out in the songs and doing a little shuffling. It creates a feeling of participation. — Alex Ebert

It is very wonderful to see persons of the best sense passing hours together in shuffling and dividing a pack of cards with no conversation but what is made up of a few game-phrases, and no other ideas but those of black or red spots arranged together in different figures. Would not a man laugh to hear any one of his species complaining that life is short? — Joseph Addison

One of the best ways to properly evaluate and adapt to the many environmental stresses of life is to simply view them as normal. The adversity and failures in our lives, if adapted to and viewed as normal corrective feedback to use to get back on target, serve to develop in us an immunity against anxiety, depression, and the adverse responses to stress. Instead of tackling the most important priorities that would make us successful and effective in life, we prefer the path of least resistance and do things simply that will relieve our tension, such as shuffling papers and majoring in minors. — Denis Waitley

Nine owls have squawked out the rules and the hawks will talk, so soon they'll come marching out of the woodpile and the woodwork - sore-head, sore-foot, right up close, one-butt-shuffling into history but demanding praise and kind treatment for deeds undone, for lessons unlearned. But studying war once more ... — Ralph Ellison

So this was a nest of radicals. She thought a hotbed of sedition would involve more gunpowder and secret handshakes, and less shuffling of feet and passing the sugar. — Frances Hardinge

The tears stung my nose as the flames licked Mahyah's body then I froze as my eyes caught on something, lifted to the sky and my breath stuck in my throat as I heard gasps all around, felt the astonished shuffling of bodies and Diandra's hand came to mine and held tight. This was because, as the flames danced high, arching through the sky over the pyre, there was a brilliant, perfect rainbow. — Kristen Ashley

We are 'GENEROUS' with criticism, open-minded about 'JUDGEMENT',
'DOUBTFUL' if self correction 'MISERLY' about praise & appreciation!
How about SHUFFLING it all..
'GENEROUS' with praise and appreciation..'MISERLY' with Criticism..
'OPEN MINDED' about Self Correction..'DOUBT' our own judgement..
SIMPLE BUT GENIUS...YES....Life changes with this SHUFFLE ! — Abha Maryada Banerjee

I know. I know. But he's always buried in those books or shuffling around the house like he's lost in some dream." "And?" "I wasn't like that." Baba sounded frustrated, almost angry. Rahim Khan laughed. "Children aren't colouring books. You don't get to fill them with your favourite colours. — Khaled Hosseini

It's easiest to disguise what you're doing when you're shuffling or dealing," Emery explained, "or when your opponent is distracted by something that's cooking in the kitchen."
Ceony opened her mouth to protest, but instead closed it and shot him a disapproving look. He had won the game last Tuesday when Ceony had cinnamon rolls in the oven. She had been worried they would burn. Perhaps that's why Emery never kept the money she lost, regardless of the amount. The cheater. — Charlie N. Holmberg

Unquestioning automatons
blindly marching to the beat -
an eerie crunching sound
hoards of shuffling feet ...
(from silent moments) — Muse

The heavy trees,
The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust,
The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines
Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths. — Wallace Stevens

A good soup attracts chairs. This is an African proverb. I can hear the shuffling and squeaking on the wood floor, the gathering 'round. This, from just five well-chosen words. — Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire. — Cormac McCarthy

You were just doing your job, she assured him. And then she thought just how powerful that sentiment was, how far down a nasty road that could take a person, shuffling along and simply doing their job. — Hugh Howey

There in that embrace, she feels something
shuffling around, moving warily
fumbling through the dusty rooms of her heart,
and, one by one, turning on the lights — Toby Barlow

Border patrol," a uniformed officer announced as he stepped on the bus. "Anything to declare?"
"I declare that this sucks," Trey said, shuffling past him.
"Hey," Eric said to the office and pointed at Trey. "I saw that guy shove something up his ass. — Olivia Cunning

Our minds can create new ideas from the components which experience has already given us, by combining together our existing ideas in new ways or by shuffling the components of our existing ideas, but we are quite unable to form any completely new ideas beyond those that have already been given to us by sensation or feeling. — David Hume

There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling. — Vladimir Nabokov

New thinking doesn't mean shuffling your old thoughts around; it means getting rid of the old and implementing the new. That way your, "I can't" become "I can!" and "I did! — Toni Sorenson

Whether you're shuffling a deck of cards or holding your breath, magic is pretty simple: It comes down to training, practice, and experimentation, followed up by ridiculous pursuit and relentless perseverance. — David Blaine

Probably the most important aspect of individual defensive play is the 'close-out.' This approach to the ball should be made in a 'step-drag action' with advanced foot moving forward first and then the back foot in a boxer's type shuffling of the feet. — Tex Winter

There was no moment of life, no waking from a darkness to find myself cured in that place. Rather there was slow shuffling towards comprehension, a few hours of recollection follow by a sleep, followed by a waking which stayed awake a little longer. — Claire North

It's all right," said Wolf. "You loved her. I would feel the same if someone wanted to erase Scarlet's identity and give it to Levana's army.
Scarlet stiffened, heat rushing into her cheeks. He certainly wasn't insinuating ...
"Aaaaw," squealed Iko. "Did Wolf just say that he loves Scarlet? That's so cute!"
Scarlet cringed. "He did not
that wasn't
" She balled her fists against her sides. "Can we get back to these soldiers that are being rounded up, please?"
"Is she blushing? She sounds like she's blushing."
"She's blushing," Thorne confirmed, shuffling the cards. "Actually, Wolf is also looking a little flustered
— Marissa Meyer

There is a world of deaf, dumb and blind people out there, who are shuffling through their lives, not knowing how wonderful life can be. They have their moments, but they are very unconscious. — Frederick Lenz

the bond market, because Wall Street was now making even bigger money packaging and selling and shuffling around America's growing debts. — Michael Lewis

God is most great! Allahu akbar! God is most great!" and sending the most faithful grimly shuffling through the dusky, unlit streets to salat al-'isha, the evening prayer. The Sabbath — Brian Catlos

To my amusement, a traffic sign prohibited ox carts from passing by revolutionary sites, out of fear that the oxen would defecate close to these venerated monuments. These strong, resilient, and patient animals weren't merely shuffling goods along roads, but because of the limited mechanization and shortage of fuel they also plowed rice paddy fields. I got the impression that, unlike in China and Vietnam where every year is the year of a different animal, in North Korea every year was the Year of the Oxen. — Felix Abt

People are shuffling by in long coats, with shopping bags and takeout, smoking cigarettes and feigning laughter - filling up their lives with distractions to shut out the chaos. — Rob Payne

I don't know, on a sitcom, and in theatre especially, you have to really be listening to an audience. And if you're losing them, you can hear the sniffs, and the playbills shuffling and whatnot. — Neil Patrick Harris

The dark swallowed him, but his dragging footsteps could be heard a long time after he had gone, footsteps along the road; and a car came by on the highway, and its lights showed the ragged man shuffling along the road, his head hanging down and his hands in the black coat pockets. — John Steinbeck

Open on three," Minho said. "And guard lady, you try anything or run away, I guarantee one of us will get you. Thomas, you count off." The woman pulled out her key card but said nothing. "One," Thomas began. "Two." He paused, allowed himself a moment to suck in a breath, but before he could yell the last number an alarm started blaring and the lights went out. CHAPTER 14 Thomas blinked rapidly, trying to adjust to the darkness. The alarm rang in shrill, deafening bursts. He sensed Minho stand up, then heard him shuffling about. "The guard's gone!" his friend shouted. "I can't find her! — James Dashner

Though we were all taught to be proud of living in this great parliamentary democracy the civil servants who ran it were a fearsome bunch - a nameless mass of people with jobs (police, social workers, record-keepers, teachers, councilmen) whose sole purpose was to keep everyone shuffling from birth to death in a nice orderly queue. Surely some social-service record had been passed to the local constabulary bearing a huge black question mark beside the name Finn and the scrawled words, Why isn't this boy in school — Meg Rosoff

Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are missed, her dreams seem to say. — Nadifa Mohamed

The wiry man scratched his head, looked the two inquisitors up and down and cleared his throat softly. "We must be quick." He turned to go, pulling his cloak over his head and shuffling through the door into the moonlight. The two inquisitors moved with impossible silence behind, floating across the straw-covered floor like the cats on the walls outside the hut. The cats froze at the disturbance before scurrying noiselessly into the shadows as the three silhouettes crossed the ten yards of grass before the blackness of the forest swallowed them. No fires flickered at this time, when the full moon was highest in the cloudless summer sky, and the three were the only waking souls in the hamlet. — Gregory Figg

Oh maturity's a wrapped up package deal so it seems
And ditching teenage fantasy means ditching all your dreams
All your friends and peers and family solemnly tell you you will
Have to grow up be an adult yeah be bored and unfulfilled
Oh when no ones yet explained to me exactly what's so great
About slaving 50 years away on something that you hate, about meekly shuffling down the path of mediocrity
Well if that's your road then take it but it's not the road for me. — Frank Turner

We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts. — Carl Sandburg

Of all the nouns we use to disguise the hollowness of the human condition, none is more influential than "myself". It consists of a collage of still images - name, gender, nationality, profession, enthusiasms, relationships - which are renovated from time to time, but otherwise are each a relic from one particular experience or another. The defining teaching of the Buddhist tradition, that of non-self, is merely pointing out the limitations of this reflexive view we hold of ourselves. It's not that the self does not exist, but that it is as cobbled together and transient as everything else. [With] the practice of meditation, ... we can begin to see how each artifact of the mind is raised and lowered to view, like so many flashcards. But we can also glimpse, once in a while, the sleight-of-hand shuffling the card and pulling them off the deck. Behind the objects lies a process. Self is a process. Self is a verb. — Andrew Olendzki

What, then, is the soul but a prisoner of your flesh? An undying yet constrained energy, bound and enslaved within a shuffling, steadily rotting suit of tissue and savage needs? — David Wong

All my life I have been trained by that siren. Before I could walk I knew the siren meant death. It meant somehow the fences had been breached and the Unconsecrated were shuffling among us. It meant grab weapons, move to the platforms and pull up the ladders - even if it necessitated leaving the living behind.
Growing up, my mother used to tell me about how in the beginning, when her own great-great-great-grandmother was a child, that siren would wail almost constantly as the village was bombarded with the Unconsecrated. But then the fences has been fortified, the Guardians had formed and time had passed with the Unconsecrated dwindling to the point that I couldn't remember a time in the past few years when that siren had wailed and it had not been a drill. I know that in my life there have been breaches but I also know that I am very good at blocking out the memories that serve me no purpose. I can fear the Unconsecrated well enough without them. — Carrie Ryan

The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way
a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable — Robert James Waller

In the state of Michigan, where I served in the state Legislature, there was a lot of shuffling of money between one year and the other to balance the budget. — Justin Amash

Gripped with bitter cold, ice-locked, Petersburg burned in delirium. One knew: out there, invisible behind the curtain of fog, the red and yellow columns, spires, and hoary gates and fences crept on tiptoe, creaking and shuffling. A fevered, impossible, icy sun hung in the fog - to the left, to the right, above, below - a dove over a house on fire. From the delirium-born, misty world, dragon men dived up into the earthly world, belched fog - heard in the misty world as words, but here becoming nothing - round white puffs of smoke. The dragon men dived up and disappeared again into the fog. And trolleys rushed screeching out of the earthly world into the unknown. ("The Dragon") — Yevgeny Zamyatin

I have got to the point in my life when a lot of people I know have died or are dying, so I realise that somewhere outside the pearly gates is a queue, shuffling nearer and nearer to the celestial box office. — Barry Humphries

What do you do with all of these people on the street? Surround them with an army of police officers to mimic their jail experience? No, you help them to assimilate into a society that wants them to be productive and healthy. We cannot solve our homeless problem by shuffling it to the corners of the city. — Antonio Manuel Chavira

Don't equate activity with efficiency. You are paying your key people to see the big picture. Don't let them get bogged down in a lot of meaningless meetings and paper shuffling. Announce a Friday afternoon off once in a while. Cancel a Monday morning meeting or two. Tell the cast of characters you'd like them to spend the amount of time normally spent preparing for attending the meeting at their desks, simply thinking about an original idea. — Harvey MacKay

The last electric titillation died on the lips, like a dying moth that quivers, quivers, ever more feebly, ever more faintly, and at last is quite still.
But for Lenina the moth did not completely die. Even after the lights had gone up, while they were shuffling slowly along with the crowd towards the lifts, its ghost still fluttered against her lips, still traced fine shuddering roads of anxiety and pleasure across her skin. — Aldous Huxley

But Noah, you're not supposed to do this, and I can't let you. So go back to your room." Then smiling softly and sniffling and shuffling some papers on the desk, she says: "Me, I'm going downstairs for some coffee. I won't be back to check on your for a while, so don't do anything foolish."
She rises quickly, touches my arm, and walks toward the stairs. She doesn't look back, and suddenly I am alone. I don't know what to think. I look at where she had been sitting and see her coffee, a full cup, still steaming, and once again I learn that there are good people in the world. — Nicholas Sparks

The treads, like his father's boots, showed signs of wear. Paint clung to them in feeble chips, mostly in the corners and undersides, where they were safe. Traffic elsewhere on the staircase sent dust shivering off in small clouds. Holston could feel the vibrations in the railing, which was worn down to the gleaming metal. That always amazed him: how centuries of bare palms and shuffling feet could wear down solid steel. One molecule at a time, he supposed. Each life might wear away — Hugh Howey

It's beginning to feel like he's shuffling his way through the seven deadly sins, in ascending order of my favourites. — Mackenzi Lee

If you depend on a single industry, if you don't continuously upgrade it, if that industry is not producing real wealth, if it's simply shuffling paper from here to here in a very efficient manner sometimes, that's not enough and that's not where you begin to get the rest of your jobs. — Juan Enriquez

The sound of shuffling pages filled the room like a delicate rainstorm falling on dried leaves. — Brenda Pandos

I am usually more impressed with people who are artful in shuffling a deck, than those who can masterfully play chess. — Lionel Suggs

Business is business, that is, you must do everything promptly; delay and shuffling won't do. — Swami Vivekananda

I missed the sound of her shuffling her homework while I listened to music on her bed.
I missed the cold of her feet against my legs when she climbed into bed.
I missed the shape of her shadow where it fell across the page of my book.
I missed the smell of her hair and the sound of her breath and my Rilke on her nightstand and her wet towel thrown over the back of her desk chair.
It felt like I should be sated after having a whole day with her, but it just made me miss her more. — Maggie Stiefvater

Recent results from astronomers who study the occasional gravitational lensing of unknown worlds by intervening stars suggest that orphan planets could be at least as numerous as the stars. In other words, there could be hundreds of billions of orphan worlds shuffling through our galaxy. — Seth Shostak