Skirting Quotes & Sayings

We followed Mrs. Morton down the High Street. She sailed, like a vessel, along the pavement, skirting around pushchairs and small dogs, and people who had stopped to wipe ice cream from their chins.
July had found its fiercest day yet. The sky was ironed into an acid blue, and even the clouds had fallen from the edges, leaving a faultless page of summer above our heads. Even so, there were those who still nurtured mistrust. We walked past cardigans draped across elbows and raincoats bundled into shopping bags, and one woman who carried an umbrella wedged into her armpit, like artillery. It seemed that people couldn't quite let go of the weather, and felt the need to carry every form of it around with them, at all times, for safekeeping.

The trouble with goats and sheep by Joanna Cannon — Joanna Cannon

When one day fate visits us again, Jessa comes running into Hannah's house to tell us the news that they've caught the serial killer. Her tone is hushed and I try hard not to look at Jude, who is working on the skirting boards. But I can feel the humour in his gaze as it falls on me and I know that I will never live down the fact that I suspected him.
When I ask her, "Who?" slightly curious, she's already out the door looking for Hannah and Tate. "No one important!" she shouts from the other room. "Just some postman in Yass." I look at Jude's face and I see it whiten and we vow never ever to tell the others. — Melina Marchetta

Parking himself on the chaise lounge, he stared at the gown that Lassiter had handled so roughly. The fine satin was bunched up in waves, the disorder creating a wonderful, shimmering display over on the bed.
"My beloved is dead," he said out loud.
As the sound of the words faded, something was suddenly, stupidly clear: Wellesandra, blooded daughter of Relix, was never filling out that bodice again. She was never going to put the skirting over her head and wriggle into the corset, or free the ends of her hair from the lace-ups in the back. She wasn't going to look for matching shoes, or get pissed off because she sneezed right after she put her mascara on, or worry about whether she was going to spill on the skirting.
She was ... dead. — J.R. Ward

SKIRTING the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling, 5
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
Till o'er the river pois'd, the twain yet one, a moment's lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing. — Walt Whitman

The moment Noah came up behind me and kissed the side of my neck, I was torn between leaning into him and skirting away. Every muscle in my body screamed to fall into him. — Katie McGarry

In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission. — Peter Hessler

The great German scholar Helmut Thielicke once said that a person who speaks to this hour's need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth. — Rob Bell

But the fact that I couldn't hold my job was worrisome. I was probably crazy. I'd been skirting the idea of craziness for a year or two, now I was closing in on it.
Pull yourself together! I told myself. Stop indulging yourself. There's nothing wrong with you. You're just wayward. — Susanna Kaysen

We must avoid coming to too close quarters with life. It is a slender crust over which you must walk without bearing down too hard. Hit your heel into it and you make a hole in which you will disappear. True philosophy has never consisted in probing all problems, but often on the contrary eluding them. We are skirting an abyss: beware of vertigo. — Edmond Scherer

Outside the gates the spectacle seemed tame in comparison; for the road bent toward Pontesordo, and Odo was familiar enough with the look of the bare fields, set here and there with oak-copses to which the leaves still clung. As the carriage skirted the marsh his mother raised the windows, exclaiming that they must not expose themselves to the pestilent air; and though Odo was not yet addicted to general reflections, he could not but wonder that she should display such dread of an atmosphere she had let him breathe since his birth. He knew of course that the sunset vapours on the marsh were unhealthy: everybody on the farm had a touch of the ague, and it was a saying in the village that no one lived at Pontesordo who could buy an ass to carry him away; but that Donna Laura, in skirting the place on a clear morning of frost, should show such fear of infection, gave a sinister emphasis to the ill-repute of the region. — Edith Wharton

Panting and gasping, Harry slowed down, skirting the Willow's swiping branches, peering through the darkness toward its thick trunk, trying to see the single knot in the bark of the old tree that would paralyze it. Ron and Hermione caught up, Hermione so out of breath she could not speak. "How - how're we going to get in?" panted Ron. "I can - see the place - if we just had - Crookshanks again - " "Crookshanks?" wheezed Hermione, bent double, clutching her chest. "Are you a wizard, or what?" "Oh - right - yeah - — J.K. Rowling

In the early universe - when the universe was small enough to be governed by both general relativity and quantum theory - there were effectively four dimensions of space and none of time. That means that when we speak of the "beginning" of the universe, we are skirting the subtle issue that as we look backward toward the very early universe, time as we know it does not exist! We must accept that our usual ideas of space and time do not apply to the very early universe. That is beyond our experience, but not beyond our imagination, or our mathematics. — Stephen Hawking

There, Margaret, the sun is forever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There - for with your leave, — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The ash her purple drops forgivingly
And sadly, breaking not the general hush;
The maple swamps glow like a sunset sea,
Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush;
All round the wood's edge creeps the skirting blaze,
Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush. — James Russell Lowell

According to one account of the New York City schools during the 1950s: The teacher could not technically hit the child, but the old crones found ways of skirting the rules. The push-probe-pull method was popular, in which the teacher would not hit you, but would poke you with her gnarled, witch-like fingers and grab your face like a taffy pull until you screamed. ... The pull-and-choke was also a favorite. It was executed by pulling the compulsory necktie up like a noose, until the errant boy's face turned the school colors. — Robert Klein

What is more beautiful than a sea of water with a number of white-winged boats skirting its surface? Poetry and beauty contesting with the wind and the waves! — George Matthew Adams

Oh, it was delicious to have someone to keep secrets with. If I'd had a sister or a brother closer in age, I guessed that's what it would be like. But it wasn't just smoking or skirting around Mother. It was having someone look at you after your mother has nearly fretted herself to death because you are freakishly tall and frizzy and odd. Someone whose eyes simply said, without words, You are fine with me. — Kathryn Stockett

I think we endure the banal as a way of skirting around the bane. — David Levithan

He walked to the exit, skirting the pools of vapor light purely out of habit, but he saw that the last lamp was unavoidable, because it was set directly above the exit gate. So he saved himself a further perimeter diversion by walking through the next-to-last pool of light, too. At which point a woman stepped out of the shadows. She came toward him with a distinctive burst of energy, two fast paces, eager, like she was pleased to see him. Her body language was all about relief. Then it wasn't. Then it was all about disappointment. She stopped dead, and she said, "Oh." She was Asian. But not petite. Five-nine, maybe, or even five-ten. And built to match. Not a bone in sight. No kind of a willowy waif. She was about forty, Reacher guessed, with black hair worn long, jeans and a T-shirt under a short cotton coat. She had lace-up shoes on her feet. He said, "Good evening, ma'am." She was looking past his shoulder. He said, "I'm the only passenger. — Lee Child

Instead of winding and skirting, Roman roads tend to go straight to the top. The chariots were light and the shortest distance between two points seemed to have governed their surveyors. I've read that some of their roadbeds go down twelve feet. — Frances Mayes

There's quite a difference between skirting the rules and putting musket balls through them. — Suzanne Enoch

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone. — Frances Mayes

It was nearly lunch-time before Blackie had finished and went in search of T. Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china, the dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators - and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become. ("The Destructors") — Graham Greene

I gently pull on Ivy's hand. Let's go," I tell Ivy, who, despite it all, still looks calm and poised. She nods and we walk away towards the back door, skirting around people and the rim of the pool.
I realize how stupid it is when it's too late.
"You WHORE!"
Melanie is a blur of motion. I feel Ivy's hand leave mine and she shrieks. I spin around and watch as she falls back.
Right in the direction of the pool. — Colleen Boyd

I gotta go," he said. Like now.
"Yes ... me, too." She flushed and stepped back, her eyes meeting his briefly and skirting away. "Anyway, I'll see you. Around."
She turned away and started walking quickly back up to the house. And guess who appeared in the doorway to meet her: Rehvenge.
Rehv ... so strong ... so powerful ... so completely able to feed her.
Marissa didn't make it another yard.
Butch shot out of the SUV, grabbed her around the waist, and dragged her back to the car. Although it wasn't as if she fought him. In the slightest. — J.R. Ward

I think there's something remarkable happening here that nobody is talking about. They're skirting the issue. For the longest time, the Republican Party has told us that they can't win with just Republican votes. And that's why they support amnesty. That's why they support the Democrats on many of their issues to go out and get Hispanics or other minorities. — Rush Limbaugh

Crossing the uplands of time, Skirting the borders of night, Scaling the face of the peak of dreams, We enter the region of light, And hastening on with eager intent, Arrive at the rainbow's end, And here uncover the pot of gold Buried deep in the heart of a friend. — Grace Coolidge