Single Line Quotes & Sayings

Do you know that if you take the books in an average school library and stretched out all those words into a single line, the line would go all the way around the world? Actually, I made that up, but doesn't it sound like it should be true? — Neal Shusterman

There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent "what if" scenarios
what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?
because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency. — Louis Menand

A line is an involuntary combination of people who are simultaneously irritated with one another and focused on a single, common circle of interests and goals. This leads to a mixture of rivalry, hostility, and collective sentiment, a constant readiness to close ranks against a common enemy - anyone who breaks the rules. — Lidiya Ginzburg

... and Dave and I, we were doing this ... this weird circling thing, like we needed to figure out every single line of the script before we could even start the movie. I knew, and he knew, and we didn't do a damn thing about it ... It's like we thought everything had to be perfect, or it wouldn't work. Like it was a story. — Mira Grant

The leaders of globalization ... have tied themselves to a single measurement by which they judge success and failure ... They only measure money and the bottom line. — Anita Roddick

Inheriting from Application is shorter than writing an explicit main method, but it also has some shortcomings. First, you can't use this trait if you need to access command-line arguments, because the args array isn't available. For example, because the Summer application uses command-line arguments, it must be written with an explicit main method, as shown in Listing 4.3. Second, because of some restrictions in the JVM threading model, you need an explicit main method if your program is multi-threaded. Finally, some implementations of the JVM do not optimize the initialization code of an object which is executed by the Application trait. So you should inherit from Application only when your program is relatively simple and single-threaded. — Martin Odersky

When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can't suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy - or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn't shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all. — Dorothea Lasky

***A SMALL THEORY***
People observe the colors of a day only at its beginnings and its ends, but to me it's quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them. — Markus Zusak

I'm not single, I'm busy. That's my line. — Renee Zellweger

Larry said he could understand the complaint, but what he did not understand was that all the people who quit - every single one - had unused vacation time. Up until the day they left, they did everything McKinsey asked of them before deciding that it was too much.
Larry implored us to exert more control over our careers. He said McKinsey would never stop making demands on our time, so it was up to us to decide what we were willing to do. It was our responsibility to draw the line. — Sheryl Sandberg

It wasn't until she was about to press Play, just as she was climbing under her covers, that she noticed it, the envelope tucked beneath the edge of her pillow. She frowned as she reached for it, her fingers lingering for only a moment before pulling it free. The plain white envelope was blank, but she suspected who it was from.
She tore the top apart and unfolded the paper inside, her heart fluttering when she recognized the handwriting.

I miss you like crazy.
Jay

Violet grinned. It was just a note - a single line, really - but even his notes made her pulse race. Ridiculous, she thought as she ran her fingertips over his words, committing them to memory. — Kimberly Derting

twelve and thirty. Because only a single line is written about that long stretch of time, those years are called his "Hidden Life. — James Martin

She watched with morbid fascination as they gathered at the stumps at the ends of the man's wrists, the old scar tissue the only place on him unclaimed by Fener, but the paths the sprites took to those stumps touched not a single tattooed line. The flies dance a dance of avoidance - but for all that, they were eager to dance. — Steven Erikson

The page contained a single, unfamiliar symbol. It looked like a backward S with the diagonals of an open triangle cutting through it. A straight line bisected both shapes. Could be creepy. Could be nothing. — Erin Kellison

Gradually I became aware of details: a company of French soldiers was marching through the streets of the town. They broke formation, and went in single file along the communication trench leading to the front line. Another group followed them. — Ernst Toller

What children
and the landing of a plane
most have in common
is that they are best made
by a line drive of pilot lights guided
through a single tambourine
across the day we met
in a field of wet metal hands on The Gospel of Lightning. — Buddy Wakefield

Kingbitter, as he did frequently nowadays, was standing at his window and looking out onto the street below. This street offered the most mundane and ordinary sights of Budapest's mundane and ordinary streets. The muck-, oil-, and dog-dirt-spattered sidewalk was lined with parked cars, and in the one-yard gaps between the cars and the leprotically peeling house walls the most mundane and ordinary passersby were attempting to go about their business, their hostile features an outward clue to their dark thoughts. Every now and then, perhaps in a hurry to overtake the single file inching along the front, one of them would step off the sidewalk, only for an entire chorus of rancorous car horns to give the lie to any groundless hope of breaking free from the line. — Imre Kertesz

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere. — Diane Setterfield

When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all. Or any of their short synonyms. And be careful not to let yourself invent a new word to use instead. Describe outward observables and interior mechanisms; don't use a single handle, whatever that handle may be. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

I find the act of writing very painful. I can go a whole month without managing a single line, or write three days and nights straight, only to find the whole thing has missed the mark.
At the same time, though, I love writing. Ascribing meaning to life is a piece of cake compared to actually living it. — Haruki Murakami

My life had a tendency to spread, get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of a baroque mirror, which came from following the line of least resistance. I wanted my death, by contrast, to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a Quaker church or the basic black dress with a single strand of pearls ... — Margaret Atwood

A single gnomic line can come to resonate with centuries of subsequent wisdom. — Gary Saul Morson

I will never, ever regret stopping you from walking out of my life a second time, Kyle," she said in an emotional voice. "And I can prove it."
She reached for the buttons on her trench coat and undid them, one at a time. Then she opened the coat and let it drop to the floor.
And even if she didn't say a single word more, Kyle knew he would never again doubt the way Rylann felt about him.
She was wearing his flannel shirt.
"You kept it," he said softly. "All this time."
She nodded. "For nine years, I've held on to this darn shirt, literally dragging it across the country and back."
Kyle touched her cheek, gently brushing away a tear with his thumb. "Why?"
She paused hesitantly, and then with a tender smile, finally put it all on the line, too. "I guess I always hoped you'd come back for it someday. — Julie James

What I like about organizing things that way is that each story gets nearly full reign over its own space, but all of them are hung on a single string - the loosely-reined voice mentioned above. Thus the collection jogs away from suzerainty and past federation toward, I guess, alliance. Or maybe call each story a separate house on a single street? Or it's all a line of dive bars on some wharf front? What the hell, let's call reading the collection a pub crawl, but with words. — Roy Kesey

Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man. — Ayn Rand

Shooting hell out of a piece of cardboard doesn't prove anything' was his single-line introduction to the Small-arms Defence Manual. — Ian Fleming

On the basis of Lorentz's theory, if we limit ourselves to a single spectral line, it suffices to assume that each atom (or molecule) contains a single moving electron. — Pieter Zeeman

Is she your Daughter of Man?' He nods toward me.
'She is a Daughter of Man. And she is traveling with me. But she's not my Daughter of Man.'
'Oh. So she's available?' ask Howler.
Raffe gives him an icy look.
'We're all single now, you know,' says Hawk.
'They can't punish us twice for the same crime' says Cyclone.
'And now that we know you're out of the race Commander, that makes me the next best-looking in line,' says Howler.
'Enough.' Raffe doesn't look amused.'You're not her type.'
The Watchers smile knowingly.
'How do you know?' I ask.
Raffe turns to me. 'Because angels aren't your type. You hate them, remember? — Susan Ee

The bottom line is, if every single platinum song right now wasn't auto-tuned, then I would be like, "I can't be a rapper." — Spencer Pratt

What. Are. Thooooooose?" the walrus moaned.
On the holo-screen airing the happenings in Genevieve Square, a swarm of scorpspitters released by the Glass Eyes was scuttling toward Alyss and the other. Never before had a Wonderlander seen these scorpion-like contraptions that could bullets of deadly poison from their "tails"
not even Bibwit, who assumed they were the latest in a long line of armaments invented by Redd. But before a single scorpspitter curled its tail into a C to take aim at the queen, she imagined into existance a horde of disembodied boots with steel-plated soles, which hovered monetarily in the air, then
With a slight nod, she brought them down hard, stomping the scorpspitters flat, squishing their armor-crapaces and making absract art of their wiry guts.
Ooh, now why can't Queen Alyss do that to the Glass Eyes?" the walrus-bulter cried. — Frank Beddor

We are not wise enough, pure enough, or strong enough to aim and sustain such a single motive over a lifetime. That way lies fanaticism or failure. But if the single motive is the master motivation of God's calling, the answer is yes. In any and all situations, both today and tomorrow's tomorrow, God's call to us is the unchanging and ultimate whence, what, why, and whither of our lives. Calling is a 'yes' to God that carries a 'no' to the chaos of modern demands. Calling is the key to tracing the story line of our lives and unriddling the meaning of our existence in a chaotic world. — Os Guinness

The single most important technique for making progress is to write ten words. Doesn't matter if you're badly stuck, or your day is completely jam-packed, or you're away from your computer - carry a small paper notebook and write a sentence of description while you're waiting on line at a coffee shop. I think of this as baiting a hook. Even if you have a few days in a row where nothing comes except those ten words, I find that as long as you have to think about the novel enough to write ten words, the chances are that more will come. — Naomi Novik

Every single line that you write, you hang on every single word, and you hang on every single moment. — Green Day

In Ukraine's cities - Kharkiv, Kiev, Stalino, Dnipropetrovsk - hundreds of thousands of people waited each day for a simple loaf of bread. In Kharkiv, the republic's capital, Jones saw a new sort of misery. People appeared at two o'clock in the morning to queue in front of shops that did not open until seven. On an average day forty thousand people would wait for bread. Those in line were so desperate to keep their places that they would cling to the belts of those immediately in front of them. Some were so weak from hunger that they could not stand without the ballast of strangers. The waiting lasted all day, and sometimes for two. Pregnant women and maimed war veterans had lost their right to buy out of turn, and had to wait in line with the rest if they wanted to eat. Somewhere in line a woman would wail, and the moaning would echo up and down the line, so that the whole group of thousands sounded like a single animal with an elemental fear. — Timothy Snyder

Man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey ... — Ayn Rand

Even then, none of the line's creators knew for sure how the line would be used. The biggest question about the line - Why? - remained imperfectly explored. All its creators knew was that the Wall Street people who wanted it wanted it very badly - and also wanted to find ways for others not to have it. In one of his first meetings with a big Wall Street firm, Spivey had told the firm's boss the price of his line: $10.6 million plus costs if he paid up front, $20 million or so if he paid in installments. The boss said he'd like to go away and think about it. He returned with a single question: Can you double the price? — Michael Lewis

Another, more fluid metaphor for the world of thought gradually suggested itself to him, derived from his former voyages at sea. A philosopher who was trying to consider human understanding in all its aspects would behold beneath him a mass molded in calculable curves, streaked by currents which could be charted, and deeply furrowed by the pressure of winds and the heavy, inert weight of water. It seemed to him that the shapes which the mind assumes are like those great forms, born of undifferentiated water, which assail or replace each other on the surface of the deep; each concept collapses, eventually, to merge with its very opposite, like two waves breaking against each other only to subside into the same single line of white foam. — Marguerite Yourcenar

That's it - hundreds of texts and conversations, thousands upon thousands of words spoken and sent, all boiled down into a single line. is that what relationships become? — David Levithan

If you're truly open, you'll put every single thing you think is true on the line. And in doing so, you live in questions, not answers. — Gail Brenner

Our tree's only source of energy is the sun: after light photons stimulate the pigments within the leaf, buzzing electrons line up into an unfathomably long chain and pass their excitement one to the other, moving biochemical energy across the cell to the exact location where it is needed. The plant pigment chlorophyll is a large molecule, and within the bowl of its spoon-shaped structure sits one single precious magnesium atom. The amount of magnesium needed for enough chlorophyll to fuel thirty-five pounds of leaves is equivalent to the amount of magnesium found in fourteen One A Day vitamins, and it must ultimately dissolve out of bedrock, which is a geologically slow process. — Hope Jahren

Randy stared into the glass he held in his hand, gazing into its cobra eyes. A double shot of thirty-year-old single malt whisky. You can't be an alcoholic when you only drink top shelf. Right? — Ted Magnuson

Every single line, every single thing has to be fought over. There's kind of like an intrinsic doubt from absolutely everyone in my crew, my producer, everyone. It's not just the film industry - it's a worldwide thing. It's the culture of the world to doubt women. — Patricia Riggen

The stems stood tall and straight, one series arranged in a single line, the other in a crudely shaped heart, the final one in the shape of the letter U. I love you. — Lurlene McDaniel

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem. — James Fenton

This was a report from a single source. It was an established and reliable line of reporting. It was quoted from a senior Iraqi military officer in a position to know this information. — John Scarlett

There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial ... Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost ... I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself! — Simone De Beauvoir

Brendan Harris loved everyone now because he loved Katie and Katie loved him. Brendan loved traffic and smog and the sound of jackhammers. He loved his worthless old man who hadn't sent him a single birthday or Christmas card since he'd walked out on Brendan and his mother when Brendan was six. He loved Monday mornings, sitcoms that couldn't make a retard laugh, and standing in line at the RMV. He even loved his job, though he wouldn't be going in ever again. — Dennis Lehane

You are silent now who once stood on battlefields ravaged by destruction unimaginable, holding in those desperate places the line of freedom for others you would never know, and who would never know you. And being one of those you never knew, I would give all I have to clasp your hand one single time, look into eyes that witnessed the bloodied carnage that results when freedom refuses to bow to chains of any kind, and simply say 'thank you. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

The modern idea of a Great Man is one who stands at the lonely extremity of some single line of development
— C.S. Lewis

The main roadway is nearly deserted and there's not a single person in front of the dimly lit library. As I follow Mick up the ivory stone steps, for a moment I wonder, is this stalker territory? Does it cross a line? A boundary? But then - fuck it, I'm a prince, we don't have boundaries - it's one of the perks. Anyone who says otherwise is doing it wrong. — Emma Chase

You told me I shouldn't fall in love with you. Remember?" "Yeah, that's because I'm insanely stubborn. I've always thought I was so damn brave. I mean I put myself on the line every single day on the job." He laughed, and it was not in amusement. "But not my heart. Never my heart. And that doesn't make me brave at all. It makes me a coward. — Jill Shalvis

If you ask who I aspire to, well, if a single line of mine was as funny as P. G. Wodehouse can be, that would be great. — Nick Harkaway

Iggy Pop looks right at me as he sings the line: 'America takes drugs in psychic defence'; only he changes 'America' to 'Scatlin', and defines us mair accurately in a single sentence than all the others have ever done. — Irvine Welsh

The bottom line is that if politicians weren't in the business of granting favors and exacting tribute, every single issue surrounding campaign finance reform would be irrelevant. After all, why would anyone spend money for influence, access, favors and tribute if the only thing that politicians do is to live up to their oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution? — Walter E. Williams

His eyebrows arched under a single, pensive line and his eyes themselves were imprinted with deep sadness, behind which from time to time could be seen dark flashes of misanthropy and hatred. — Alexandre Dumas

They could do anything. That, however, was part of what made it difficult to bring [it] to a close. Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of choosing, to the single world line of history. The future becoming the past: there was something disappointing in this passage through the loom, this so-sudden diminution from infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality to reality which was the action of time itself. The potential was so delicious - the way they could have, potentially, all the best parts of all...time, combined magically into some superb, as-yet-unseen synthesis - or throw all that aside, and finally strike a new path to the heart of just government. . . .To go from that to the mundane problematic...was an inevitable letdown, and instinctively people put it off. — Kim Stanley Robinson

It takes an awful lot of time for me to write anything. I have endless drafts, one after another; and I try out 50, 75, or a hundred variations on a single line sometimes. I work on the process of refining low-grade ore. I get maybe a couple of nu ggets of gold out of 50 tons of dirt. It is tough for me. No, I am not inspired. — James Dickey

Didn't Chains tell you about the Golden Theological Principle?"
"The what?"
"The single congruent aspect of every known religion. The one shared, universal assumption about the human condition."
"What is it?"
"He said that life boils down to standing in line to get shit dropped on your head. Everyone's got a place in the queue, you can't get out of it, and just when you start to congratulate yourself on surviving your dose of shit, you discover that line is actually circular. — Scott Lynch

Long Distance training can be a positive & constructive form of selfishness. After all, once you're at the starting line, you're there by yourself. No one can run a single step for you. No one can jump in & help you. No one but you can make the decisions about what to do to keep going. It's all up to you. — John Bingham

Then came my favorite line of all: "you are to give him the name Jesus" (v. 31). Do you realize this was the first proclamation of our Savior's personal name since the beginning of time? Jesus. The very name at which every knee will one day bow. The very name that every tongue will one day confess. A name that has no parallel in my vocabulary or yours. A name I whispered into the ears of my infant daughters as I rocked them and sang lullabies of His love. A name by which I've made every single prayerful petition of my life. A name that has meant my absolute salvation, not only from eternal destruction, but from myself. A name with power like no other name. Jesus. — Beth Moore

The first line grabs me by the throat. "Therefore we do not lose heart." Somebody knows how not to lose heart? I'm all ears. For we are losing heart. All of us. Daily. It is the single most unifying quality shared by the human race on the planet at this time. We are losing - or we have already lost - heart. — John Eldredge

The problem may be a literary one: we are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives. We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower - and wither - all around us.
Even those who live out the best version of the familiar story line might not find happiness as their reward. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I know a woman who was lovingly married for seventy years. She has had a long, meaningful life that she has lived according to her principles. But I wouldn't call her happy; her compassion for the vulnerable and concern for the future have given her a despondent worldview. What she has had instead of happiness requires better language to describe. There are entirely different criteria for a good life that might matter more to a person - honor, meaning, depth, engagement, hope. — Rebecca Solnit

It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Law officials put their lives on the line every single day for us, and I think we also owe them a degree of respect. — Benjamin Carson

Suddenly a single shot on the extreme left rang out on the clear morning air, followed quickly by several others, and the whole line pushed rapidly forward through the brush. — John Gibbon

Philip remembered the story of the Eastern King who, desiring to know the history of man, was brought by a sage five hundred volumes; busy with affairs of state, he bade him go and condense it; in twenty years the sage returned and his history now was in no more than fifty volumes, but the King, too old then to read so many ponderous tomes, bade him go and shorten it once more; twenty years passed again and the sage, old and gray, brought a single book in which was the knowledge the King had sought; but the King lay on his death-bed, and he had no time to read even that; and then the sage gave him the history of man in a single line; it was this: he was born, he suffered, and he died. — W. Somerset Maugham

It's clear by now that the problem of language evolution is completely intractable when you approach it from the perspective of a single discipline. For all the salient questions to be answered, the multidisciplinary nature of the field will have to become even more so. So far, it has taken years for individuals in different departments to start talking, to develop research questions that make sense for more than one narrow line of inquiry, and to start to understand one another's points of view. The field of language evolution needs students who can synthesize information from neuroscience, psychology, computer modeling, genetics, and linguistics. The more this happens, the richer and wider the field will become, instead of devolving around one or two theoretical issues. — Christine Kenneally

I saw 'Clueless' probably when I was about 8 or 9 years old. And, I had certain films that I would fall asleep so it was 'Clueless' for quite a long time, and I used to just watch it every single night and knew every single line, every single quote. — Saoirse Ronan

the line between hunter and hunted can be as small as a single moment of unreadiness. — J.A. McLachlan

Only a single line is needed to discover who is doing what. — Paul Reps

For instance, the cards that I wrote for the company's 'I'd Like to Declare My Confused and Ambiguous Fondness for You' line were all notorious failures, some of which were blamed as the single direct cause of several nasty divorces, and some of their purchasers had actually taken the effort to discover the identity of their anonymous author, sending me hate mail, dead fish, and poorly wrapped, oil-stained packages emitting ticking noises. — Dexter Palmer

What Jacob and Monod had discovered, in essence, was that each gene acts like a single line in a computer program. — Gary F. Marcus

To be sure, ASPM isn't the gene responsible for building big brains - there's no such single gene. But it's critical to the process, and the primate line has almost certainly benefited from distinct changes in ASPM. — Sam Kean

Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort.
...
You have probably never experienced in yourself the meandering roots of a whole watershed or felt your outstretched fingers touching, by some clairvoyant extension, the brooks of snow-line glaciers at the same time you were flowing toward the Gulf over the eroded debris of worn-down mountains. — Loren Eiseley

I am getting quite uneasy about him, though why I should I do not know, but I do wish that he would write, if it were only a single line — Bram Stoker

There is a different beauty in simplicity, in a single line placed just so, a single flower among the rocks. The harshness of the stone makes the flower more precious. — Robert Jordan

I suppose you want me to give certificates to all the contestants? Little plastic trophies to every single athlete or soldier for participation? Should we all line up and shake hands and tell each other, Good game? No! — Rick Riordan

You never know where your next job is going to lead you, down the road. One single episode that might seem so far removed from what you might end up doing in the future might spark somebody's memory bank. Just one little line you said or a look you gave might be what they want to pursue with a character. — Amanda Schull

If there's a single message passed down from each generation of American parents to their children, it is a two-word line: Better Yourself. And if there's a temple of self-betterment in each town, it is the local school. We have worshipped there for some time. — Ellen Goodman

As with the factory, so with the office: in an assembly line, the smaller the piece of work assigned to any single individual, the less skill it requires, and the less likely the possibility that doing it well will lead to doing something more interesting and better paid. — Jill Lepore

The 3.5 billion unreached people on earth would form a single file line that would stretch around the equator 25 times! Can you picture 25 lines of Christless people, trampling endlessly toward hell? Let that vision stay with you day and night. — Larry Stockstill

Am I suggesting 100% test coverage? No, I'm not suggesting it. I'm demanding it. Every single line of code that you write should be tested. Period. — Robert C. Martin

They were all in line, single file, like an armada from hell. It was a magnificent sight. — Lee Child

the pace at which Sean Connery speaks stems from a decision he's made. And every single vowel delivered is with respect for the language. But he delivers it so naturally and with so much humanity that you don't realize that, technically, he is giving a master class in how to deliver a line. — Ron Perlman

I guess if I was made responsible for every single line of dialogue in a game and every single piece of textual visual detail, every sign or piece of graffiti, then yes, I think that would be comparable to the time and effort required to write a very long novel, indeed. — Richard K. Morgan

The stories we love may not always fit neatly into a single time line, but they will always matter. — John Jackson Miller

If you think about it, every single species is endangered. Homo sapiens at the front of the line, mosquitoes and lawyers at the back. — Henry Rollins

When I was young, I was a hunter, walking wooded hillsides with confident steps and a gun in my hand. I knew the blur of wings, the rocketing form, and the Great Moment that only hunters know, when all existence draws down to two points and a single line. And the universe holds it breath. And what may be and what will be meet and become one - before the echo returns to its source. — Pete Dunne

even though the mind of humanity was ultimately one mind, still, each and every single individual had to establish his or her own special, personal, particular, unique, direct, one-on-one, hands-on relationship with reality, with the universe, with the Divine. It might be complicated, it might be a pain in the ass, it might be, most of all, lonely - but it was the bottom line. — Tom Robbins

Great. He was a hottie, a good kisser, and a literature buff. God really must have had a sense of humor, because if I had to name my biggest turn-on, it was literature. And he had just recommended a book that I didn't know, that wasn't taught in school. If I were single, there would be no better pick-up line. Suddenly, I found myself thinking back to Atonement - you know, the scene in the book where the two main characters have sex in the library? Even though Chloe said doing it against bookshelves would be really uncomfortable (and she'd probably know), it was still a fantasy of mine. Like, what's more romantic than a quiet place full of books? But I shouldn't have been thinking about my library fantasies. Especially while I was staring at Cash. In the middle of a library. — Kody Keplinger

The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities - that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future - will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There's a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands. — Warren Buffett

The chief characteristics of the tall building is that it is lofty. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation so that from bottom to top it should be a unit without a single dissenting line. — Louis Sullivan

And the smoke rose slowly, slowly,
Through the tranquil air of morning,
First a single line of darkness,
Then a denser, bluer vapor,
Then a snow-white cloud unfolding,
Like the tree-tops of the forest,
Ever rising, rising, rising,
Till it touched the top of heaven,
Till it broke against the heaven,
And rolled outward all around it. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates. — Stephen Jay Gould

I love all the girls who have my song on their myspaces. I love the people who come to my shows and put the pictures on here. I love the people at those shows who sing along with me. I love reading your stories in emails, some so touching they've given me chills. I love every single person who has wanted my autograph, because for the life of me I never really thought it would mean something to someone for me to write my name down. I love the little girls who stand in line with their mothers like I used to do. That was me. I love the couple who danced to my song at their wedding. Every comment, letter, and message. I love people who listen to the radio. I love every single person who is reading this, because you've let me into your life.
I love you all so much, I just wanted you to know. — Taylor Swift

Every single line on the Oscar show is negotiated. Unless you've been there, you have no idea how it is put together. It's like nothing else on earth. I'm writing a book about it, but I have to throw in my sexual escapades to make sure it sells. — Bruce Vilanch

My war - and I have yet to win a decisive battle - is with the modes of thought and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism). — James Hillman

Raphael lifted a finger, tracing it over her cheekbone. She flinched. Not because he was hurting her. The opposite. The places he touched ... it was as if he had a direct line to the hottest, most feminine part of her. A single stroke and she was embarrassingly damp. But she refused to pull away, refused to give in.
(page 33 , Gollancz edition) — Nalini Singh

Whenever I heard that languid, beautiful melody, those days came back to me. It wasn't what I'd characterize as a happy part of my life, living as I was, a balled-up mass of unfulfilled desires. I was much younger, much hungrier, much more alone. But I was myself, pared down to the essentials. I could feel each single note of music, each line I read, seep down deep inside me. My nerves were sharp as a blade, my eyes shining with a piercing light. And every time I heard that music, I recalled my eyes then, glaring back at me from a mirror. — Haruki Murakami

All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion. The Divine Being is eternal and universal and infinite and cannot be the sole property of the Mussulmans or of the Semitic religions only, - those that happened to be in a line from the Bible and to have Jewish or Arabian prophets for their founders. — Sri Aurobindo