Some Rotary Quotes & Sayings

We settled in a booth at Bishop's 4th Street Diner, an aging silver zeppelin on the rotary outside the naval base, grungy and stuffed with Betty Boop tchotchkes in the windows. The waitress greeted Abbass familiarly and promptly took her order: a hamburger, rare, and fries. — Marilyn Johnson

If there is some demiurge out there, delicately constructing camera eyes or piecing together rotary flagella, he or she is a contingent being, part of the physical order, just another natural phenomenon, but not the source of all being, not the transcendent creator and rational ground of reality, and so not God. By the same token, if there is no such demiurge, that too is a matter of utter indifference for the question of God. How, after all, could the existence or nonexistence of some particular finite being among other beings provide an ultimate answer to the mystery of existence as such? — David Bentley Hart

The problem was that, from the very beginning, Christian values were always more popular in American culture than the Christian gospel. That's why one could speak of "God and country" with great reception in almost any era of the nation's history but would create cultural distance as soon as one mentioned "Christ and him crucified." God was always welcome in American culture. He was, after all, the Deity whose job it was to bless America. The God who must be approached through the mediation of the blood of Christ, however, was much more difficult to set to patriotic music or to "Amen" in a prayer at the Rotary Club. — Russell D. Moore

It has been the way of Rotary to focus thought upon matters in which members are in agreement, rather than upon matters in which they are in disagreement. — Paul Harris

Rotary provides training at all levels so that those who have been selected for leadership positions have the opportunity to learn and apply leadership principles to their jobs. — Ron D. Burton

Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies. — Octavio Paz

After we left the hospital this afternoon, Mum and I went over to Alice's place to meet Ben and the kids. We all had pizza for dinner. (Thankfully Roger had a Rotary meeting; I was not in the mood for Roger. I can't think of anyone ever being in the mood for Roger, except for Mum, presumably, and Roger, of course.) We didn't tell the children that Alice had lost her memory. We just said she'd hit her head at the gym but she was going to be fine. — Liane Moriarty

An article can be timely, topical, engaged in the issues and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month. In five years, it may have acquired the quaint aura of a rotary phone. An article is usually Siamese-twinned to its date of birth. — Cynthia Ozick

I'm obsessed with old rotary phones. — Jenny Lewis

Singing is not indulged in by Rotary clubs of some countries and all clubs are given full privilege to do as they please about including it in their programs. — Paul Harris

He was probably stud duck at the Rotary Club cookouts. I could have taken him while whistling the Michigan fight song and balancing a seal on my nose. — Robert B. Parker

The handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had been reserved for the Ladies' Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club. — Sinclair Lewis

Those porch girls had no idea they were going to sprawl on that couch until the weight of their adolescent bodies sank down into the pillows. They have no idea when they will get up off that couch. They have no plans for what will happen next. They only know their bodies touching as they try to keep cool. They only know that the coolest spot they can find is in front of that rotary fan.
I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhibit my life like a porch. — Rebecca Wells

A police car went by with its siren going, a rotary slurping noise, it sounded like the blender in their kitchen - she made fruit shakes compulsively that they felt morally bound to drink. — Don DeLillo

It is better to use this available energy for your observation, inner observation. Just watch everything - and it is good because you have nothing much to do. You have not to go here and there and visit people and become a member of the Rotary Club. You are saved from so much nonsense that I felt really jealous of you! Enjoy it! And feel sorry for everybody else! They are poorer and you can become immensely rich. And the art of that richness is witnessing. Witnessing is another name for meditation. — Rajneesh

Resentment is a storytelling passion,' says the philosopher Charles Griswold in his book Forgiveness. I know well how compelling those stories are, how they grant immortality to an old injury. The teller goes in circles like a camel harnessed to a rotary water pump, diligently extracting misery, reviving feeling with each retelling. Feelings are kept alive that would fade away without narrative, or are invented by narratives that may have little to do with what once transpired and even less to do with the present moment. — Rebecca Solnit

The foundation upon which Rotary is built is friendship; on no less firm foundation could it have stood. — Paul P. Harris

A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures - so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they'll behave when we trap them in 'situations' that they can't IM their way out of. — Walter Kirn

I have a rotary phone from the sixties, it take forever to dial, which keeps me from making impulsive calls. — Natalie Standiford

You've been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General - just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns - 'fess up! With your great experience, don't you honest, cross-your-heart, think that perhaps - just maybe - when a country has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes, so that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne'er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General! — Sinclair Lewis

There, gleaming in the glow, was that ten-horsepower rotary engine under a seat. A key glistening in the ignition. I imagine the top speed for that old mower was five miles per hour. It might have taken an hour and a half or more for me to get to the liquor store, but get there I did. — George Jones

Ever since her diagnosis, she's been fading like a light bulb with cancer's hand on the rotary dimmer. — Danielle Esplin

People in Indiana like to see their politicians at the county fair or the Rotary Club. — Richard Mourdock

I went from rotary phone to Twitter. And was appalled at the notion. — Jeff Perry

I mean, my age is just a number. So what if you were born in the era when they still used rotary phones and cassette tapes? I think it's cute. — T.S. Krupa

Americans are less mystical about what produced their inland or meadow courses; they are the product of the bulldozerm rotary ploughs, mowers, sprinkler systems and alarmingly generous wads of folding money. — Alistair Cooke

All of us are born with a set of instinctive fears - of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, of speaking before a Rotary Club, and of the words "Some Assembly Required". — Dave Barry

Why is it that when we had rotary phones, when we were having folks being crippled by polio, that we were teaching the same way then that we're doing right now? — Geoffrey Canada

In fiction, I searched for my favorite authors, women I have trusted to reassure me than not all teenage guys are total ditwads, that the archetype of the noble cute hero who devotes himself to the girl he loves has not gone the way of the rotary phone. That all I had to do was be myself (smart, hardworking, funny) and be patient and kind and he and I would find each other.
As Bea would say, this why they call it fiction. — Sarah Strohmeyer

It would not be fair to the critics of Rotary, who include some of the most brilliant of the British and American writers, to charge them with prejudice. — Paul Harris

The Rotary Club will do the work, because business people are busy. But the impact and the value of this will be to the business. — Dan Abrams

steel tractor implements buried in more overgrown grass, the rotary blades shining bright from recent use by — Thomas Hollyday

For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet. — Gustave Flaubert

These rotary dials were like meditation, they forced you to slow down and concentrate. If you polled the next number too soon, you had to start over from the top. — Rainbow Rowell

One spring morning timing the lean near-liquid progress of a horse on a track, the dust exploding, the rapid hasping of his hocks, coming up the straight foreshortened and awobble and passing elongate and birdlike wish harsh breaths and slatted brisket heaving and the muscles sliding and brunching in clocklike flexion under the wet black hide and a gout of foam hung from the long jaw and then gone in a muted hoofclatter, the aging magistrate snapped his thumb from the keep of the stopwatch he held and palmed it into his waistcoat pocket and looking at nothing, nor child nor horse, said anent that simple comparison of rotary motions and in the oratory to which he was prone that they had witnessed a thing against which time would not prevail. — Cormac McCarthy