Sluice Quotes & Sayings

Raphael stripped off the robe and showered quickly. Normally he wouldn't have bothered since he intended to bathe in his enemy's blood before the night was over. But he was covered in Cyn's Blood and she was his. Her BLOOD was his, and no one else's. So he let the soap and water sluice over his body, and he swore privately that the blood of those who harmed his Cyn would run like water tonight. — D.B. Reynolds

A lot happens in our everyday life, but it always happens within the same routine, and more than anything else it has changed my perspective of time. For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Showers"

The child tells me, put a brick in the tank,
don't wear leather, don't eat brisket,
snapper, or farmed salmon - not tells,
orders - doesn't she know the sluice gates
are wide open and a trillion gallons
wasted just for the dare of it?

Until the staring eye shares that thrill,
witnessing: I am just iris and cornea,
blind spot where brain meets mind,
the place where the image forms itself
from a spark - image of the coming storm.

Still the child waits outside the bathroom
with the watch she got for Best Essay,
muttering, two minutes too long.

Half measures, I say. She says, action.
I: I'm one man. She: Seven billion.

If you choose, the sea goes back. — Dennis Nurkse

Let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing. — John Adams

For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on. At the same time I see that precisely this repetitiveness, this enclosedness, this unchangingness is necessary, it protects me. On the few occasions I have left it, all the old ills return. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Broadway - the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham. — O. Henry

I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my 'Creative Projects' folder - it's a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. Any time I have an Internet connection, there's a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos. — Adam Savage

There were things hiding inside of her I wasn't equipped to see and this collapse ripped her open to me. I searched her cavities for symbols that would betray her true nature, but found nothing I could read, just a vast absence containing her poverty of morals. I should've known, the need for my presence in her life was never love, only a sluice of goodness she would let flood the gulley of her body when she needed to appear human. — K.I. Hope

Then the sluice gates opened and Lotte said it had been a long time since she saw her brother, that her son was in prison in Mexico, that her husband was dead, that she had never remarried, that necessity and desperation had driven her to learn Spanish, that she still had trouble with the language, that her mother had died and her brother probably didn't even know it, that she planned to sell the shop, that she had read a book by her brother on the plane, that the shock had almost killed her, that as she crossed the desert all she could do was think of him. — Roberto Bolano

Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. — Anthony Burgess

Radio is a bag of mediocrity where little men with carbon minds wallow in sluice of their own making. — Fred Allen

Why is it that places thousands of miles from my childhood village home send me back, opening the sluice-gates of the past? Well, we are all emigrants from the homeland of our childhoods. It may be, then, that the natural place to meet ourselves as children is 'abroad', and that includes the foreign country of our growing up and aging. So it is that the personal, physical feeling of departure from the time of childhood may merge in a special symbiosis with geographical departure, biography and geography resonating now on a single wavelength. — Georgi Gospodinov

What never fails to astonish at Skara Brae is the sophistication. These were the dwellings of Neolithic people, but the houses had locking doors, a system of drainage and even, it seems, elemental plumbing with slots in the walls to sluice away wastes. The interiors were capacious. The walls, still standing, were up to ten feet high, so they afforded plenty of headroom, and the floors were paved. Each house has built-in stone dressers, storage alcoves, boxed enclosures presumed to be beds, water tanks, and damp courses that would have kept the interiors snug and dry. The houses are all of one size and built to the same plan, suggesting a kind of genial commune rather than a conventional tribal hierarchy. Covered passageways ran between the houses and led to a paved open area - dubbed "the marketplace" by early archaeologists - where tasks could be done in a social setting. — Bill Bryson

I once read that most people are afraid to live alone because to live alone means to die alone. They have visions of themselves eating their breakfast, enjoying the dripping sluice of a ripe plum, and then suddenly the lights go out and they fall face-first into their pancakes. People, it seems, are less afraid of loneliness than worrying about what other people will think when they're found in some unappealing, disintegrating state, tongue out, one leg curled underneath the other, internal fluids in a puddle on the floor, etcetera. Most people are afraid that if left alone, they will not be found. Being found is apparently of the utmost importance to people. — Jessica Anthony

This plucky NASA telescope is able to find planets en masse. If you compare planet hunting to prospecting for gold, then Kepler is equivalent to trading in your trusty pan for a diesel-powered sluice box. — Seth Shostak

I get up at 5.30am, sluice myself and have two Weetabix and some mint tea, before starting to write by 6am. — Andrew Motion

An old Russian folk song is like water held back by a dam. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its depths it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates and the stillness of its surface is deceptive. By every possible means, by repetitions and similes, the song slows down the gradual unfolding of its theme. Then at some point it suddenly reveals itself and astounds us. That is how the song's sorrowing spirit comes to expression. The song is an insane attempt to stop time by means of its words. — Boris Pasternak