Single Track Quotes & Sayings

There's something uncontaminated about her, and I don't even mean sexually or whatever. I mean the way she is, at her core. Like when you wake up and the world has been blanketed by snow overnight, and not a single footstep or tire track has spoiled the untouched perfection of it. — Tammara Webber

I succumbed to the lure of the oracle, he thought.
And he sensed that succumbing to this lure might be to fix himself upon a single-track life. Could it be, he wondered, that the oracle didn't tell the future? Could it be that the oracle made the future? — Frank Herbert

You have to track every single thing you eat if you want to keep posting big numbers on the scale each week. — Ali Vincent

America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the "tough guy;" today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive. — Ellen Glasgow

People meant very little to Mike, but their performance a great deal. He worshiped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own field and he felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; — Ayn Rand

The modern recording studio, with its well-trained engineers, 24-track machines and shiny new recording consoles, encourages the artist to get involved with sound. And there have always been artists who could make the equipment serve their needs in a highly personal way - I would single out the Beatles, Phil Spector, the Beach Boys and Thom Bell. — Jon Landau

When you refuse to settle for less than the best ... the best tends to track you down. — Mandy Hale

I've been around the track a lot. I've had the best of the years, and I don't want a single year back. — Abraham A. Ribicoff

The single biggest change in middle-distance running, from the 1500 metres to 10,000 metres, has been the track surface. — Herb Elliott

To what gulfs A single deviation from the track Of human duties leads even those who claim The homage of mankind as their born due, And find it, till they forfeit it themselves! — Lord Byron

Each of us has to blaze our own trail and figure out the best path for our own lives. Every so often, I think it's important to stop and look around to see that we're still on the trail that we once embarked upon some time ago. If somewhere along along the way we look up and the trailhead is nowhere to be found and we seem to have gone painfully off track - that's okay too. Every single day we have a choice to get back on track and when it's all said and done, it's abundantly clear that there is more than one way to get to the finish line of a life well lived. — Chris Hill

[I]t is rather the past and the future which are the fleeting illusions, and the present which is eternally real. We discover that the linear succession of time is a convention of our single-track verbal thinking, of a consciousness which interprets the world by grasping little pieces of it, calling them things and events. But every such grasp of the mind excludes the rest of the world, so that this type of consciousness can get an approximate vision of the whole only through a series of grasps, one after the other. — Alan W. Watts

I'm on a single track here - I work to direct what I want to see onstage. I basically have been feeding my own needs - to be working on a specific project at a specific time, and fortunately more often it works than fails. — Harold Prince

But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie. — Roberto Bolano

Until the album is perfect and every track sounds like a single and has a world-renowned icon on it, it's not done. — Riff Raff

Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we're done with this world, but a single person's 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh's pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag. — Edward Humes

And no, I've not been obsessive enough to keep track of the hours and minutes, or even the seconds, but I've noticed every single one of them. — Jenna Elizabeth Johnson

I said it before and I'll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there's only movies.
Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I'd be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don't write movies. You make movies. — Stephen Fry

Every Bass Communion track is based on a single sound source. Increasingly I find that I'm really interested in taking a particular sound and it's almost like solving a problem. If I have a sound, the problem is how can I create a piece of music from this one sound source? — Steven Wilson

Speed is relative. Does it feel fast going 70 miles per hour down an eight lane highway? No, probably not, but I bet it does if you are going down some single lane dirt road. It's the same in a race car. It depends on the track. — Kyle Petty

He knew it would take as many years as could think of now to forget the tracks, no matter how deeply buried. Some morning in autumn, spring, or winter he kn he'd wake and, if he didn't go near the window, if he just lay deep and snug and warm, in his bed, he would hear it, faint and far away.
And around the bend of the morning street, up the avenue, between the even rows of sycamore, elm and maple, it the quietness before the start of living, past his house h would hear the familiar sounds. Like the ticking of a doe the rumble of a dozen metal barrels rolling, the hum of single immense dragonfly at dawn. Like a merry-go-round like a small electrical storm, the color of blue lightning, coming, here, and gone. The trolley's chime! The hiss like a sc fountain spigot as it let down and took up its step, and starting of the dream again, as on it sailed along its way, traveling a hidden and buried track to some hidden and buried destination. — Ray Bradbury

The fear came from the loss of income and the sudden detour in her career. As a third-year associate, she was earning $180,000 a year in base salary, plus a nice bonus. A lot of money, but life in the city had a way of devouring it. Half evaporated in taxes. She had a savings account, one she halfheartedly acknowledged. When you're twenty-nine, single, and free in the city, in a profession where next year's package will exceed this year's salary plus bonus, why worry too much about saving money? She had a friend from Columbia Law who'd been at S&P for five years, had just made junior partner, and would earn about half a million this year. Samantha had been on that track. — John Grisham

Never had I felt so much the slave as when I scoured those stone steps each afternoon. Working against time, I would wet five steps, sprinkle soap powder, then a white doctor or a nurse would come and, instead of avoiding the soppy steps, walk on them and track the dirty water onto the steps that I had already cleaned. To obviate this, I cleaned but two steps at a time, a distance over which a ten-year-old child could step. But it did no good. The white people still plopped their feet down into the dirty water and muddled the other clean steps. If I ever really hotly hated unthinking whites, it was then. Not once during my entire stay at the institute did a single white person show enough courtesy to avoid a wet step. — Richard Wright

Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can't make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don't get back on track somehow, I'm dead, that's the sense I get. There isn't a single strong emotion inside me. — Banana Yoshimoto

There seems to be this assumption that when we have "found ourselves" we have centered on one single version of who we can be. Why is the key to sincerity the pursuit of a single identity? Why is it assumed that our authenticity, whether personal or artistic, lies in "discovering" one single track? — Pablo Helguera

It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wide iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees. — Trish Deseine

I'm astounded by people who can listen to music when they write. I can only assume that they have multi-track brains, while mine is decidedly single. — Elizabeth McCracken

You end up throwing a ton of energy into one or two tracks, and the song that we thought was gonna be the single isn't the single. — Ed Robertson

As scientists, we track down all promising leads, and there's reason to suspect that our universe may be one of many - a single bubble in a huge bubble bath of other universes. — Brian Greene

Voters replaced Democratic senators with Republicans in Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina, Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia, and likely in Alaska, and appear on track to do so in a runoff next month in Louisiana. At the same time, voters kept Republicans in GOP seats in heavily contested races in Georgia, Kansas, and Kentucky. That is at least ten, and as many as a dozen, tough races, without a single Republican seat changing hands. Tuesday's voting was a wave alright - a very anti-Democratic wave. — Byron York

We can track and see the production of single molecules, trace them and see how they assemble into structures. — Eric Betzig

You imagine that I look back on my life's work with calm satisfaction. But from nearby it looks quite different. There is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will stand firm, and I feel uncertain whether I am in general on the right track. — Albert Einstein

It's better than I imagined
and I imagined it a lot. Tucked away in a corner at school. On the track during gym class. In his car. On the street by my house. In a fancy restaurant. During dance class. In the cafeteria. Everywhere, really. But not a single one of those fantasies measured up to the actual real life thing
trapped inside a magic box. — Cassie Mae

He let himself into the house and sat down with his back against the door, where the tiles were cool on his legs and he tried to hear, as he had earlier imagined, every single thing that his wife was not doing in their home on this Sunday night. He could hardly keep track of it all, she was so busy being absent. She was not pouring water into a glass or a pitcher. She was not kicking his shoes out of the hall. She was not switching the laundry into the dryer. She was not opening the screen door and going outside barefoot and calling for him to come look at the sunset. She was not putting lotion on her elbows or flattening the newspaper or picking up the ringing telephone, which would go on calling out the absence of Petra in nine-ring sequences dozens of times every day. — Ramona Ausubel

One who has never known the turbulence of life, in whom the petals of the mysterious flower within have never opened; such a one may seem happy, may seem a saint, his single track mind may impress the multitude with its power - but he is ill equipped for life's true adventure into the infinite. — Rabindranath Tagore

Hell," he said, looking down his body. "I shouldn't have thought about that just yet. Now Alice is going to come out of the bathroom and see you standing there being demanding. That's not very gentlemanly ... "
This just made him even harder.
With a sigh, he snatched up her pirate hat and slapped it over his crotch. "There. Now we can at least present the semblance of a man who doesn't have a single track mind. — Katie MacAlister

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries. — Boris Pasternak

I have a single track mind. I work on an idea for a long time. It's like getting acquainted with a person, and I don't get acquainted easily. — Georgia O'Keeffe

I'm remixing an R.E.M. track called 'I've Been High' from their last album, 'Reveal.' It's a beautiful song, but record execs didn't put it out as a single because it didn't sound like the R.E.M. we're used to. So I asked Michael Stipe if I could have the tapes to do a remix, and he agreed. — Lukas Haas

Those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters. — Robin McKinley