Sifting Out Quotes & Sayings

Given the lack of public skills in reading photographs, given that photographic content is sometimes buried in beauty, contemporary landscape photographers are often condemned to making pretty pictures. Dramatic clouds and sifting light can overwhelm more mundane information. Yet who can resist beautiful landscape pictures of one kind or another? Not I. — Lucy R. Lippard

Men's hearts are being searched ... it is a tremendous sifting time, not only of actions but of inner motives. Nothing can escape the all-searching eye of God. — Frank Bartleman

I can't tell you how to live your life," Samuel said, "although I do be telling you how to live it. I know that it might be better for you to come out from under your might-have-beens, into the winds of the world. And while I tell you, I am myself sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining
small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come of age. — John Steinbeck

... scientific method is not the same as the scientific spirit. The scientific spirit does not rest content with applying that which is already known, but is a restless spirit, ever pressing forward towards the regions of the unknown, ... it acts as a check, as well as a stimulus, sifting the value of the evidence, and rejecting that which is worthless, and restraining too eager flights of the imagination and too hasty conclusions.[7]

- Archibald Garrod, Archibald Garrod, "The Scientific Spirit in Medicine: Inaugural Sessional Address to the Abernethian Society", St. Bartholomew's Hospital Journal, 20, 19 (1912) — Archibald Garrod

When I'm sifting the compost seed or pruning, I argue over issues in my head; I talk to myself. — Ken Livingstone

Kissing's nothing like dancing. Think of it as you would..." He flicked a glance to the fossil-studded cave wall. "An excavation."
"An excavation?"
"Yes. A proper kiss is like an excavation. When you're digging up your little troglodytes, you don't just go plunging your shovel into the soil higgledy-piggledy, do you?"
"No." Her wariness stretched the word.
"Of course not. A proper excavation takes time and care. And very close attention to detail. Slowly sifting through the layers. Unearthing surprises as you go. — Tessa Dare

History had already done the really messy work, when Wintermute found him, sifting him out of all of the war's ripe detritus, gliding into the man's flat gray field of consciousness like a water spider crossing the face of some stagnant pool, — William Gibson

Our mental health depends on a mechanism for editing the moment-by-moment ocean of sensory data flowing into our consciousness down to a manageable trickle of the noticed and remembered. The cannabinoid network appears to be part of that mechanism, vigilantly sifting the vast chaff of sense impression from the kernels of perception we need to remember if we're to get through the day and get done what needs to be done.* Much depends on forgetting. — Michael Pollan

I should spank you; I didn't enjoy you impulsively ditching me, but I did enjoy your driving."
"Wait, back up. You ... " She paused as she replayed what he'd said earlier. "I was watching for you; how the hell?"
"I think somewhere between screaming freedom, and crying your pretty little eyes out, you missed me sifting in and I was at a loss for the weirdness of the situation. I was also pretty sure you wanted some alone time — Amelia Hutchins

So couples relive romantic memories, families watch home movies, and friends "catch up" with each other, as if they've lagged behind on a trail. Sifting memory for saliences to report, they reveal how vital pieces of their identity have changed. Aging, we tailor memories to fit our evolving silhouette, and as life's vocabulary changes, memories change to fathom the new order. Lose your memory, and you may drift in an alien world. — Diane Ackerman

So this estate is given each of us to determine whether or not we will merit glory and honor "for ever and ever," or whether we will rebel and refuse or be indifferent and not comply with the conditions and the laws and the ordinances provided by a merciful Father for our guidance through life and our protection and our salvation and thereby, by so doing, deny ourselves the fabulous gift and blessing of eternal life. This life, then, is a time of "sifting," a time when the "wheat" is separated from the "chaff," a time of deciding who is who and where we will live after we die. — ElRay L. Christiansen

Some kind of clutter is difficult - letting go of things with sentimental value, sifting through papers - but some clutter I find very refreshing to clear. I drive my daughters nuts because I'm always wandering into their rooms to clear clutter. — Gretchen Rubin

The farmer after sacrificing pleasure, taste, freedom, thought, love, to his work, turns out often a bankrupt, like the merchant.This result might well seem astounding. All this drudgery, from cockcrowing to starlight, for all these years, to end in mortgages and the auctioneer's flag, and removing from bad to worse. It is time to have the thing looked into, and with a sifting criticism ascertained who is the fool. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

At the water's edge, barrels of pitch blazed like huge bonfires. Their reflection, crimson as the rising moon, crept to meet us in long, wide stripes. The burning barrels threw light on their own smoke and on the long human shadows that flitted about the fire; but further to the sides and behind them, where the velvet ringing rushed from, was the same impenetrable darkness. Suddenly slashing it open, the golden ribbon of a rocket soared skywards; it described an arc and, as if shattering against the sky, burst and came sifting down in sparks.
- Easter Night — Anton Chekhov

Make all good men your well-wishers, and then, in the years' steady sifting, Some of them turn into friends. Friends are the sunshine of life. — John Hay

Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light. — Toni Morrison

When searching out a history, sifting through a thousand facts and ten thousand lives, one often uncovers pieces that do not fit. — Julie Berry

She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily.
I'd know her head anywhere.
And what's inside it. I think of that, too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy? — Gillian Flynn

From my spirit's gray defeat, From my pulse's flagging beat, From my hopes that turned to sand Sifting through my close-clenched hand, From my own fault's slavery, If I can sing, I still am free. For with my singing I can make A refuge for my spirit's sake, A house of shining words, to be My fragile immortality. — Sara Teasdale

To learn is as beautiful as to live.
Do not be afraid to lose yourself in minds greater than your own. Do not sit brooding anxiously over your own individuality or shut yourself out from influences that draw you powerfully for fear that they may sweep you along and submerge your innermost pet peculiarities in their mighty surge. Never fear. The individuality that can be lost in the sifting and reshaping of a healthy development is only a flaw; it is a branch grown in the dark, which is distinctive only so long as it retains its sickly pallor. And it is by this sound growth in yourself that you must live. Only the sound can grow great. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

If virtuous, the government need not fear the fair operation of attack and defense. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting the truth, either in religion, law, or politics. — Thomas Jefferson

[I]f he had to guess, he would say that the reason he doesn't want to loan the book out, to Ethan or anyone else, is because of the part of his personality that is one gigantic record-keeping system, a complex sifting and filing scheme that dictates what goes here and what goes there, turning his life into so many marks on a tablet. His mind would busy itself with the book's whereabouts every second it was away. He knows it would. — Kevin Brockmeier

Instead of looking at leadership as decision making - as a rational process of sifting through data, analyzing trends, and making decisions based on predicting futures - a design framework emphasizes pragmatic experimentation. — Frank J. Barrett

Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence. — John O'Donohue

It's all about intelligence; and intelligence comes down to a bunch of faceless bureaucrats sifting through all this crap. — Tom Clancy

Maybe happiness was an hourglass already running out, the grains tipping, sifting past each other. Maybe it was a state of mind. — Paula McLain

The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve. — Buddha

Accurate and minute measurement seems to the non-scientific imagination, a less lofty and dignified work than looking for something new. But nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement and patient long-continued labour in the minute sifting of numerical results. — Lord Kelvin

I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining
small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age. — John Steinbeck

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat. Oh! be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my feet! Our God is marching on. — Julia Ward Howe

I'd love to say that every move I make is completely calculated and I'm sitting on a pile of scripts, sifting through them for the perfect role, but the fact is that there are a lot of talented people out there and there's a lot of competition in our business. — Eric Balfour

She rolled toward him, nestling close and throwing her arm over his chest. Her fingers toyed idly with the hair there, sifting — Tessa Dare

In any case, if the reader would have a correct idea of the mood of these exiles, we must conjure up once more those dreary evenings, sifting down through a haze of dust and golden light upon the treeless streets filled with teeming crowds of men and women. For, characteristically, the sound that rose towards the terraces still bathed in the last glow of daylight, now that the noises of vehicles and motors
the sole voice of cities in ordinary times
had ceased, was but one vast rumour of low voices and incessant footfalls, the drumming of innumerable soles timed to the eerie whistling of the plague in the sultry air above, the sound of a huge concourse of people marking time, a never-ending, stifling drone that, gradually swelling, filled the town from end to end, and evening after evening gave its truest, mournfullest expression to the blind endurance which had ousted love from all our hearts. — Albert Camus

Pessoa invented The Book of Disquiet, which never existed, strictly speaking, and can never exist. What we have here isn't a book but its subversion and negation: the ingredients for a book whose recipe is to keep sifting, the mutant germ of a book and its weirdly lush ramifications, the rooms and windows to build a book but no floor plan and no floor, a compendium of many potential books and many others already in ruins. What we have in these pages is an anti-literature, a kind of primitive, verbal CAT scan of one man's anguished soul. — Fernando Pessoa

Singing at the Edge of Need by Susan Laughter Meyers (fragment)
Three things I turned my back to: light,
the past, the trunk of an old tree.
One by one each unfastened itself.
To sit is to present when the roll is called.
I knew that. I wore my hat of straw, fringed
like fingers sifting a breeze. My hat
collecting a thousand thoughts ...
... I had no map
and few lessons yet to guide me.
I was a study of questions. O Grandmother,
I was small, sitting in the midst of wildness,
a child thrilling at the boss of thunder.
A rustle of leaves, moss tipping at me-
I was small, I was hunger, I was thirst-
wings flitting in a brush pile. O Grandmother,
I was small, kneeling in the midst of wonder,
quaking and singing at the edge of need. — Susan Laughter Meyers

Firing the question back is a way of sifting through our memories to pick up clues about what the questioner is asking. We understand the question okay, but we can't answer it until we fish out the right "memory picture" in our heads. — Naoki Higashida

Management guru Jim Collins has some good words here. He and Morten T. Hansen studied leadership in turbulent times. They looked at more than twenty thousand companies, sifting through data in search of an answer to this question: Why in uncertain times do some companies thrive while others do not? They concluded, "[Successful leaders] are not more creative. They're not more visionary. They're not more charismatic. They're not more ambitious. They're not more blessed by luck. They're not more risk-seeking. They're not more heroic. And they're not more prone to making big, bold moves." Then what sets them apart? "They all led their teams with a surprising method of self-control in an out-of-control world."2 — Max Lucado

The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design. — James Salter

Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative. — T. S. Eliot

The child you hold in your arms is your gift to a future that you will not see. Therefore, we must turn a blind eye to ourselves and selflessly pour the best of ourselves into our children while rigorously sifting out the worst of ourselves. And once we are utterly spent by such daring gestures, we will shockingly discover the resulting emptiness as astonishingly filled. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

I want to say this about the textbook situation. Our associate athletic director for compliance at the time, Chris King, did a superb job of sifting through a maze of paperwork, finding out exactly what the problem had been and setting the course to correct it. The gist of the issue was a worker in the bookstore who was friendly with the athletes, was giving the athletes textbooks, which was an extra benefit. The players did repay the full amount of the costs of the books and had their eligibility restored after sitting out four games. Despite the — Mal Moore With Steve Townsend

I've been sifting through the layers
of dusty books and faded papers.
They tell a story I used to know;
one that happened so long ago. — Kate Wolf

But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard -to-pin-down striated pillow formation. — Neal Stephenson

Secrets - even in hardened criminals, they were just air pockets lodged under debris at the bottom of an ocean. It might take an earthquake, or you scuba diving down there, sifting through the sludge, but their natural proclivity was always to head straight to the surface - to get out. — Marisha Pessl

Algaliarept varied its shape, sifting through my mind without me even knowing to choose what scared me the most. Once it had been Ivy. Then Kisten - until I had pinned him in an elevator in a foolish moment of vampire-induced passion. It's hard to be scared of someone after you've French-kissed him. — Kim Harrison

She had not been his and now she was his. Or she had always been his and just now knew it. Cora's attention detached itself. It floated someplace past the burning slave and the great house and the lines that defined the Randall domain. She tried to fill in its details from stories, sifting through the accounts of slaves who had seen it. Each time she caught hold of something - buildings of polished white stone, an ocean so vast that there wasn't a tree in sight, the shop of a colored blacksmith who served no master but himself - it wriggled free like a fish and raced away. She would have to see it for herself if she were to keep it. — Colson Whitehead

Sifting through our thoughts like children going through colored stones
optimistic, because although some were too dark and some were too sharp, many glittered like precious gems. — Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

I do not know all of the providences of the Lord, but I do know that he permits false doctrine to be taught in and out of the Church and that such teaching is part of the sifting process of mortality — Bruce R. McConkie

I began to see as all this weighing and sifting what this text means and that text means, and whether folks are saved all by God's grace, or whether there goes an ounce o' their own will to't, was no part o' real religion at all. You may talk o' these things for hours on end, and you'll only be all the more coxy and conceited for't. — George Eliot

Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond
Now coldness comes sifting down, layer after layer,
To our bower at the lily root.
Overhead the old umbrellas of summer Wither like pithless hands.
There is little shelter.
Hourly the eye of the sky enlarges its blank
Dominion. The stars are no nearer. Already frog-mouth and fish-mouth drink The liquor of indolence, and all thing sink Into a soft caul of forgetfulness. The fugitive colors die. Caddis worms drowse in their silk cases,
The lamp-headed nymphs are nodding to sleep like statues.
Puppets, loosed from the strings of the puppetmaster
Wear masks of horn to bed. This is not death, it is something safer. The wingy myths won't tug at us anymore: The molts are tongueless that sang from above the water Of golgotha at the tip of a reed,
And how a god flimsy as a baby's finger
Shall unhusk himself and steer into the air. — Sylvia Plath

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts ... .We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need - not all the time, surely, but from time to time - to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember - the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived. — Frederick Buechner

Astronomers who were recently sifting through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a big dust cloud at the center of our galaxy, found a substance there called ethyl formate, which is the chemical responsible for the flavor of raspberries, and the smell of rum, the drink popular with pirates. Therefore, our galaxy tastes a bit of raspberries and smells of rum, which is nice. — John Connolly

Socially interacting with a storyteller can be a frustrating challenge because a portion of her awareness is constantly sorting through the details of a developing book. And while you may successfully engage in a meaningful conversation with her, an additional part of her mind is frantically sifting through descriptive lines to be used if ever she were to write this exchange down. The trouble with writers is that they are ALWAYS writing! — Richelle E. Goodrich

And each year now
we know more, but we know no better
what we see in the sky is simply
the softened gloss of the past sifting
back to us, and likewise, every atom
down the body's shining length
was inside a star, and will be again. — Christopher Buckley

Champion Ven knelt in the ruins of the village. Sifting through the rubble, he lifted out a broken doll, its pink dress streaked with dirt and its pottery face cracked.
There was always a broken doll.
Why did there always have to be a damn doll? — Sarah Beth Durst

I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. — Gillian Flynn

I stared at him for a moment, sifting through everything he'd just said and trying to find an appropriate response, but the only thing I could think of was, "Westerns?" "Really? That's all you got?" "Are you sixty-five?" "Shut the fuck up. — Nicole Jacquelyn

You will need to increase the number of eggs and liquid when using coconut flour. The general ratio rule I follow is 1/2 cup (60 g) coconut flour plus 5 eggs plus 1/2 cup (120 ml) coconut milk (or other liquid). This ratio will vary depending on the other ingredients in the recipe; for example, if the recipe calls for mashed bananas, the bananas will add extra moisture to the batter, so you'll need to reduce another liquid, say coconut milk, by 1/4 cup (60 ml). And if I'm adding cacao powder to a recipe, I usually adjust the flour down a little or increase the liquid slightly because cacao powder also absorbs moisture. Break Up Lumps. Coconut flour tends to be clumpy, so sifting the flour before mixing it into a recipe will help you avoid finding clumps in your baked goods. I tend to place my batters in a food processor, which helps break down the clumps without having to sift the flour. Store It Dry. Coconut flour is best if stored at room temperature in your pantry. — Heather Connell

When you are having fun and creating something you love, it shows in the product. So when a woman is sifting through a rack of clothes, somehow that piece of clothing that you had so much fun designing speaks to her; she responds to it and buys it. I believe you can actually transfer that energy to material things as you're creating them. — Tom Ford

Could tiny birds be sifting through me right now, birds winging through the gaps between my cells, touching nothing, but quickening in my tissues, fleet? — Annie Dillard

This is the process of mental analysis, sifting through the selves, sifting through your thoughts, practicing mindfulness, learning to control thought. — Frederick Lenz

Cosmology is serious business and in our hearts we are nothing if not cosmologists, hanging in a cold cage sifting the ruthless jewels of existence. — Dennis Overbye

Some people spend so much time hunting treasure that they fail to see it all around them. It's like sifting through gold to find the silt. — Richard Paul Evans

Closing his eyes, he held her tightly and sifted place in a general southerly direction, pushing to the farthest limits his diminished power could carry him. The moment he rematerialized, he instantly sifted again, arms locked around her.
Railroad track. Sift. Grocery store. Keep moving. Roof of a house. Sift. Cornfield. Sift. Cornfield. Sift. Cornfield. Sift. Cornfield. Bloody Midwest. Sift. — Karen Marie Moning

As I was sifting through a heap of old and new "identity cards," I noticed that something was missing: my identity. — Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Put in every joke that's not a dud and then let's just start pulling the ones that work the least. You're just constantly sifting until you're left with the biggest chunks of gold. The audience also tells you what some of those chunks are. You can have your own favorites, and then, once you screen it for an audience, the audience tells you what they're entertained by. I feel like that's a big part of it. — Jason H. Moore