Quotes & Sayings About Spinning Plates

My life was such a careful balance, a fragile nexus of work and attention and preparation and planning, like the old vaudeville trick of spinning plates on poles all over a stage, running from one to another to another, not letting any of them fall. I'd been so good at it, the running and the spinning. I'd been getting up before dawn and staying late after school and running and spinning the plates for as long as I could remember. I was getting so tired. I didn't want to run and spin anymore. But I didn't know what would happen, I didn't know who I would be, if one of the plates broke. — Katherine Howe

I don't keep things safe. I used to. Perhaps. I can't keep all the plates spinning. I drop some." ... "Well, that is always the risk, if you're a plate, isn't it? If you want to be spun, then you must accept the possibility of being broken. — Paul Cornell

You know the circus performer who spins the plates in the air you know, and he'll spin six or seven plates in the air? Acting sometimes is kind of that guy spinning all those plates in the air but in your head and in your body. — Philip Seymour Hoffman

I'm not a very organized person for being uber work-obsessed. I struggle to keep it all organized because everything can become important and, when you have so many spinning plates, they sometimes can cancel each other out because you lose track of everything. — Drew Barrymore

There was once a poor shoemaker who had three fine strong sons and two pretty daughters and a third who could do nothing well, who shivered plates and tangled her spinning, who curdled milk, could not get butter to come, nor set a fire so that smoke did not pour into the room, a useless, hopeless, dreaming daughter, to whom her mother would often say that she should try to fend for herself in the wild wood, and then she would know the value of listening to advice, and of doing things properly. And this filled the perverse daughter with a great desire to go even a little way into the wild wood, where there were no plates and no stitching, but might well be a need of such things as she knew she had it in herself to perform ... — A.S. Byatt

I am much less autistic now, compared to when I was young. I remember some behaviors like picking carpet fuzz and watching spinning plates for hours. I didn't want to be touched. I couldn't shut out background noise. I didn't talk until I was about 4 years old. I screamed. I hummed. But as I grew up, I improved. — Temple Grandin

My priority is my son and my husband, and I have a lot of spinning plates, so I try to make sure they're not one of them. — Sherri Shepherd

'Having it all' is such an intimidating concept. Just when you think you have all those plates spinning perfectly ... something changes. It is a constant balancing act. — Leigh-Allyn Baker

The mishandling of food and equipment with panache was always admired; to some extent, this remains true to this day. Butchers still slap down prime cuts with just a little more force and noise than necessary. Line cooks can't help putting a little English on outgoing plates, spinning them into the pass-through with reverse motion so they curl back just short of the edge. Oven doors in most kitchens have to be constantly tightened because of repeatedly being kicked closed by clog-shod feet. And all of us dearly love to play with knives. — Anthony Bourdain

I have late onset ADHD. I take on too much and end up spinning plates, but it's entertaining, and it helps you make quick connections if you're a comedian, if you have a brain that can dance around too much. — Rory Bremner

I enjoy multi-tasking, so I want to do a lot of different things. I want to keep all the plates spinning. — Annie Lennox

There was a crash from the direction of the kitchen, although it really was more of a crashendo - the long drawn out clatter that begins when a pile of plates begins to slip, continues when someone tries to grab at them, develops a desperate counter-theme when the person realises they don't have three hands, and ends with the roinroinroin of the one miraculously intact plate spinning round and round on the floor. — Terry Pratchett

I'm a working musician, so it's what I do. I kind of always have lots of plates spinning, and it's the ones that keep spinning the longest that I end up doing. — Damon Albarn