Sledgehammer Quotes & Sayings

Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they'd fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn't help it. Life was a compulsive salesman. — Glen Duncan

Why slap them on the wrist with feather when you can belt them over the head with a sledgehammer. — Katharine Hepburn

Guilt wears track shoes. Sprint, marathon, or cross-country, it doesn't matter. It runs tireless to catch you, and it carries a sledgehammer. — Jamie Mason

Dominic tooled up five minutes later in a ten-year-old Nissan pickup truck that had been painted a non-standard khaki, dipped in dried mud up to the wheel arches and then randomly smacked with a sledgehammer to give it that Somali Technical look. I found myself checking to see if there was a mount for a fifty-caliber machine gun in the back. — Ben Aaronovitch

Wanting people to listen, you can't just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you'll notice you've got their strict attention. — Kevin Spacey

Genius: 1. to believe your own thought. To believe that what is true for you is ultimately true. 2. a sledgehammer. 3. the fruit of labour and thought. 4. soul. 5. the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. 6. something one can become. — Heinrich Heine

ISIS is a monstrosity. It didn't come from nowhere. It's one of the results of the U.S. hitting a very vulnerable society - Iraq - with a sledgehammer. — Noam Chomsky

Unless you hit your television with a sledgehammer, you're not going to be able to be an individual. — Justin Theroux

You don't live in the past; you take a sledgehammer to it to see what stands so that you can build on it. — Samuel L. Drew

The head of the sledgehammer was cold, icy cold, and it touched his forehead as gently as a kiss.
'Pock! There,' said Czernobog. 'Is done.' There was a smile on his face that Shadow had never seen before, an easy, comfortable smile, like sunshine on a summer's day. The old man walked over to the case, and he put the hammer away, and closed the bag, and pushed it back under the sideboard.
'Czernobog?' asked Shadow. Then, 'Are you Czernobog?'
'Yes. For today,' said the old man. 'By tomorrow, it will all be Bielebog. But today, is still Czernobog.'
'Then why? Why didn't you kill me when you could?'
The old man took out an unfiltered cigarette from a pack in his pocket. He took a large box of matches from the mantelpiece and lit the cigarette with a match. He seemed deep in thought. 'Because,' said the old man, after some time, 'there is blood. But there is also gratitude. And it has been a long, long winter. — Neil Gaiman

When you get real stage fright, it comes like a sledgehammer out of the blue in the middle of something that you know you've done too many times before, and there's no rhyme or reason for it. It's something quite different from being nervous. It's almost paralysing. — Billie Whitelaw

You'll see! We're going to the palace. Fetch Angua. We might need her. And bring the search warrant.
You mean the sledgehammer, sir?
Yes. — Terry Pratchett

In Soviet thinking the concept of economy of force has little place. Whereas to an Englishman the taking of a sledgehammer to crack a nut is a wrong decision and a sign of mental immaturity ... in Russian eyes the cracking of nuts is clearly what sledgehammers are for. — Max Hastings

Your writing", she said to me, "it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness ... — Charles Bukowski

What we want, of course, what lies in the cupboard marked 'important,' is connection, love: If the deepest source of human hunger had a name, that would be it; if the boxes of constraint in which so many women live could be smashed to bits, that would be the tool, the sledgehammer that shatters emptiness and uncovers the hope buried beneath it. — Caroline Knapp

To a hammer, every problem is a nail," we said on the team but we called him 'the screwdriver'. We were confronted with stubborn nails and we needed a sledgehammer. — Massimo Marino

I am so alone, all the time, even when I'm surrounded by people. Sometimes I get really tired of the walls, and I wish I had the strength to just go at them with a sledgehammer. — Karole Cozzo

When you're a sledgehammer, you don't need to be unobvious. You just need one good hit. — Stylo Fantome

The reason I prefer the sledgehammer to the rapier and the reason I believe in blunt, violent, confrontational forms for the presentation of my ideas is because I see that what's happening to the lives of people is not rapierlike, it is not gentle, it is not subtle. It is direct, hard and violent. The slow violence of poverty, the slow violence of untreated disease. Of unemployment, hunger, discrimination. This isn't the violence of some guy opening fire with an Uzi in a McDonald's and forty people are dead. The real violence that goes on every day, unheard, unreported, over and over, multiplied a millionfold. — George Carlin

Elsewhere, evidence of callousness to the homeless is even more blatant. As just one example, Hawaii state representative Tom Brower proudly goes hunting for homeless people who have filled shopping carts with their meager belongings; upon finding them, Brower, who says he's "disgusted" by the homeless, smashes their carts with a sledgehammer.70 Even in relatively "liberal" San Francisco, the city's main Catholic Church has installed a sprinkler system to drench homeless folks who occasionally sleep in the doorways.71 And recently, Alaska Congressman Don Young suggested that if wolves were introduced into communities where they weren't currently to be found, those areas "wouldn't have a homeless problem anymore."72 It is no doubt this kind of visceral contempt that animates the recent rise in hateful assaults upon the homeless around the nation. — Tim Wise

You are about as covert as a sledgehammer. — Gail Carriger

Booming and yet muffled, croaking, like an amplified premature burial, it called out "Merriiiiinnnnnn!" And then the massive and shiveringly hollow jolt of a single sledgehammer blow against the bedroom wall. "God — William Peter Blatty

It hit her like a sledgehammer, and it was then that she knew what to feel. A liquid trail of hate flooded her chest.
Knowing that she would hate him long and well filled her with pleasant anticipation, like when you know you are going to fall in love with someone and you wait for the happy signs. Hating BoyBoy, she could get on with it, and have the safety, the thrill, the consistency of that hatred as long as she wanted or needed it to define and strengthen her or protect her from routine vulnerabilities. — Toni Morrison

It started slow and hit her with the force of a sledgehammer, a cataclysm of such power she could only hold on to him and let it happen. He went rigid against her, rock hard in her arms, and he probably muttered "oh, shit" again, but she was beyond hearing, lost in some mind-scattered cloud of inexpressible pleasure. She fell back, limp, awash in shimmering sensation, and she knew an odd, faint trace of regret that he'd used a condom. She'd wanted all of him inside her, a total giving, and he'd withheld something. — Anne Stuart

Because he was so, so wrong about hearts and buildings being different. They are the same. They are structures that keep us safe, that shield us from the elements. And the minute they start to falter, everything else is at risk. A heart can be condemned, just as a building can be. A heart can be destroyed by a sledgehammer disguised as rejection, by a bulldozer masquerading as a careless word. A heart can be blasted to pieces and ruined to the ground. — Karina Halle

When one door closes, find another."
Kylie gazed back up. "And what if there isn't another door?"
"Then you try the window."
"And if there's not a window?" Kylie asked.
"Then you find a sledgehammer and make a window. — C.C. Hunter

Rather than going after our walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them and smell them and get to know them well. We begin a process of acknowledging our aversions and our cravings. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to build the walls: What are the stories I tell myself? What repels me and what attracts me? We start to get curious about what's going on. — Pema Chodron

If criticism is needed, do it tactfully. Don't use a sledgehammer when a fly swatter will do the job. — Ann Landers

I don't think I will ever be the same. No. I know I won't be. I can't be, not after this. There is no going back. And then I'm hit with a sledgehammer made of heart and truth that feels like its blowing me to smithereens. I don't want to ever be with anyone else. I can't be with anyone else. I want Linden and I want him forever. Tears spring to my eyes as I clamp them shut and think, You're it, you're it, you're it. All this time you've been it. — Karina Halle

At that exact moment, Nancy Grace, a CNN legal commentator who combines the nuance of a sledgehammer with the social graces of a harpy.. — Charles P. Pierce

Monetary policy does not work like a scalpel but more like a sledgehammer. — Liaquat Ahamed

However," Bob continued, and the word came down like a sledgehammer, "there is a line at which a likable bad boy becomes a nasty entitled bastard whom the public would rather see hung out to dry in the street than pay to watch prance about a stage in his bloomers. And when somebody starts abusing their fans, making an absolute arse of themselves in public places, and alienating the people who paid for their bloody Ferrari, they may consider that line crossed."

Lainie wondered if an actual "Hallelujah" chorus had appeared in the doorway, or if it was just the sound of her own glee.

She still had no idea why she was the privileged audience to this character assassination, but she warmly appreciated it. — Lucy Parker

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there. — Seamus Heaney

Many operations involved intercepting and seizing someone traveling in a moving vehicle, often with bodyguards. The task force would surreptitiously attach a tracking beacon to the target's car. Delta was already experimenting with technologies that used an electromagnetic pulse to shut a car's battery down remotely. The unit also used a catapult net system that would ensnare car and driver alike. Once the car had been immobilized, operators would smash the window with a sledgehammer, pull their target through the window, and make off with him, shooting any bodyguards who posed a threat, while an outer security perimeter kept anyone who might interfere at bay. The operators had a name for these snatches: habeas grab-ass. — Sean Naylor

Why use a sledgehammer when a butterfly net will suffice? — Thea Harrison

Rule Number One is this: If you're open to learning, you get your life-lessons delivered as gently as the tickle of a feather. But if you're defensive, if you stubbornly persist in being right instead of learning the lesson at hand, if you stop paying attention to the tickles, the nudges, the clues - boom! Sledgehammer. — Gay Hendricks

The fact is that there is a contradiction going on but our brains don't like contradiction. So when Moe hits Curly on the head with a sledgehammer and Curly says, "ow" and Moe says, "Serves you right Numbskull", you can say that's because they're separate beings, and that's true. — Brad Warner

Liberals don't care. Their approach is to rip out society's foundations without asking if they serve any purpose. Why do we have immigration laws? What's with these borders? Why do we have the institution of marriage, anyway? What do we need standardized tests for? Hey, I like Keith Richards - why not make heroin legal? Let's take a sledgehammer to all these load-bearing walls and just see what happens! — Ann Coulter

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars. — Alice Hoffman

Her knee caught him between the legs with pitiless accuracy, driving the wind from his chest, making him teeter for a breathless moment, then bringing him down like a sledgehammer to a house of cards. As he slid groaning to the carpet in that special, shooting agony that only a blow to the fruits can produce, it was little consolation that he had been right.
His Queen was quite evidently a woman of rare and fiery passion. — Joe Abercrombie

If I can capture truth in its simplest form, beauty will follow like a sledgehammer. — Mark Twain

It is the direct man who strikes sledgehammer blows, who penetrates the very marrow of a subject at every stroke and gets the meat out of a proposition, who does things. — Orison S. Marden

He doesn't move.

Please, I beg him inwardly.

Please go up to bed.

It's hard enough to look at his face each day and not feel heartbreak. I can't be close to him right now. I'm afraid I'll give in and kiss him again. The way his hard body had aligned so perfectly with mine is burned in my consciousness. I'll be trying not to remember that for weeks.

I wait, and I ache.

Finally the door clicks open. I hear him exit the car. When the door slams shut, I feel it like a sledgehammer to the heart.

Don't look, I coach myself.

But my self-control isn't infinite. His fair hair glints under the streetlight as his long legs eat up the walkway in just a few paces. Seeing him walk away from me splinters something inside me. — Sarina Bowen

When I was a young fellow I was knocked down plenty. I wanted to stay down, but I couldn't. I had to collect the two dollars for winning or go hungry. I had to get up. I was one of those hungry fighters. You could have hit me on the chin with a sledgehammer for five dollars. When you haven't eaten for two days you'll understand. — Jack Dempsey

We took a sledgehammer to the rules of English and reassembled the pieces into a language only we understood. — Anthony Marra

I can't die like this. I have things to do. My adventure has hardly begun. Everything goes black. I see Death. Ain't so fascinating. It's a sledgehammer. — Karen Marie Moning

Oh, thank goodness you're here," the priest said. "I think this poor boy tried to kill himself with a sledgehammer. — Joey Comeau

She turns her head, throws the damn thing with a strong flick, and it lands in the side of a wooden heron's head. Holy shit. I can't believe it. Lust bashes me like a sledgehammer, and I suddenly imagine her naked.
"Dude!" Blake yells, snapping me back to reality.
Anna stares down at me like she's conquered me. "You showed your colors!"
"Did not," I reply quickly. But even as I say it, I think I bleedin' well might've. — Wendy Higgins

SOPA has been described as hitting a carpet tack with a sledgehammer. But technology was a sledgehammer to the music industry, one that allowed digital distributors like Apple to grow rich. — Peter Lerangis

Sometimes life gets in your way.
it gets all up in your damn way.
But it doesn't get all up in your damn way
because it wants you to just give up and let it take control.
Life doesn't get all up in your damn way because it just wants you to hand it all over and be carried along.
Life wants you to fight it
Learn how to make it your own.
it wants you to grab and axe and hack through the wood.
It wants you to get a sledgehammer and break through concrete.
It wants you to grab a torch and burn through the metal and steel until you can reach through and grab it.
Life wants you to grab all the organized, the alphabetized, the chronological, the sequenced. It wants you to mix it all together,
stir it up,
blend it. — Colleen Hoover

I mean ... who was it that said if the door is locked, find a window. If the windows locked, well ... break it. If it won't break then find a freaking sledgehammer and make a new one. — C.C. Hunter

The only time I've tried to make plans, the cosmic sledgehammer has intervened and something else has happened. You just have to wait and see what comes your way, so that's what I do. — Peter Capaldi

Reformed theology isn't a sledgehammer with which to hit people, it's a pillow on which they can lay their weary heads. — Burk Parsons

Sometimes someone just takes a sledgehammer to your heart and even if you still have feelings for them, you can't ever quite feel the way you used to. The innocent part is all gone. — Melissa Senate

Rather than going after these walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them, and smell them and get to know them well. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to build these walls: what are the stories we tell ourselves? What repels me and what attracts me? Without calling what we see right or wrong, we simply look as objectively as we can. We can observe ourselves with humor, not getting overly serious, moralistic or uptight about the investigation. Year after year, we train in remaining open and receptive to whatever arises. Slowly, very slowly, the cracks in the walls seem to widen and, as if by magic, bodhichitta is able to flow freely. — Pema Chodron

And his dick looks like a hot dog that got hit with a sledgehammer and sewn back together by a blind lady."
"Thanks, Port."
"You're welcome, D. — Jeremy Robert Johnson

I think topical songwriting is a real gift, and it's hard not to be pedantic and show up with the sledgehammer message. — Mary Chapin Carpenter

I'm sorry if I seem to digress, but that is precisely what I was thinking at the moment. It's the way my mind works. Things are not the same in real life as they are in, for instance, the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes. Brains, in reality, do not go clickety-clickety-clickety-click from A to B to C to D and so forth, rushing like a train along the rails, until at the end, with a happy "Toot-toot!" they arrive at their destination, Z, and the case is suddenly solved. Quite the contrary. In reality, analytical minds such as my own are forever shooting wildly off in all directions simultaneously. It's like joyously hitting jelly with a sledgehammer; like exploding galaxies; like a display of fireworks in which the pyrotechnic engineer has had a bit too much to drink and set off the whole conglobulation all at once, by accident. — Alan Bradley

One might as well try to perform brain surgery with a sledgehammer. — Ben Bernanke

Once again, I am sorry to take a sledgehammer to so small and fragile a nut, but I have to do so because more than 40 per cent of the American people believe literally in the story of Noah's Ark. — Richard Dawkins