Quotes & Sayings About Stepping Out Of Line

I agree that comedy does a good job - and is often about - stepping over the line - Lenny Bruce, etc. - and that this is important for a lot of poets too. I guess I feel like there has to be depth. — Rachel Zucker

Choosing a mate is not a matter of can they do the job, rather will they. A partner of "potential" doesn't make for a happy marriage. Their actions have to be in line with your needs. — Shannon L. Alder

I've learned that history is the autobiography of the historian, that ignoring the past is the act of a fool, and that loyalty does not mean falling into line, but stepping out of it for the people you love. — Annie Barrows

Here's one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning. It's like that old riddle about a tree falling in a forest, and whether it makes a sound if there's no one around to hear it.
You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every time. That's how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to bust out of orbit, to spin out to a place where no one can touch you. To lose yourself
to get lost.
Or maybe you wouldn't be surprised. Maybe some of you already know.
To those people, I can only say: I'm sorry. — Lauren Oliver

What does it mean, this notion of ... reading? ... it returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. Even more, we are reminded of all we need to savor
this instant, this scene, this line. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise, the tumult, to discover our reflections in another mind. As we do, we join a broader conversation, by which we both transcend ourselves and are enlarged. — David L. Ulin

I cut an imposing figure. I am large, and I'm tall, and I have tattoos. I am actually really quiet and shy, but maybe people see me, and they don't want to step out of line, or equate disagreement with stepping out of line with a writer they like. — Roxane Gay

Lines and Squares
Whenever I walk in a London street,
I'm ever so careful to watch my feet;
And I keep in the squares,
And the masses of bears,
Who wait at the corners all ready to eat
The sillies who tread on the lines of the street,
Go back to their lairs,
And I say to them, "Bears,
Just look how I'm walking in all of the squares!"
And the little bears growl to each other, "He's mine,
As soon as he's silly and steps on a line."
And some of the bigger bears try to pretend
That they came round the corner to look for a friend;
And they try to pretend that nobody cares
Whether you walk on the lines or squares.
But only the sillies believe their talk;
It's ever so portant how you walk.
And it's ever so jolly to call out, "Bears,
Just watch me walking in all the squares! — A.A. Milne

It would be rare to find a woman who hadn't endured some kind of ridicule for stepping out of line. When the market dictates that a woman's value is primarily attached to her looks and deferential behaviour, it's the threat of sexually degrading insults that help to keep her in check. — Clementine Ford

Despite being some of the most powerful people in the world, the top men in the Kremlin were scared of stepping out of line. Marxism-Leninism answered all questions, so the eventual decision would be infallibly correct. Anyone who had argued for a different outcome was therefore revealed to be culpably out of touch with orthodox thinking. Dimka sometimes wondered if it was this bad in the Vatican. — Ken Follett

Stepping on that line for me, it will be about facing my fears. — Lolo Jones

People have always tut-tutted about actors stepping out of line politically. And I can sort of see it because what you've got your fame for is not being someone who can influence things, so it's cheating. — Joanna Lumley

That night we danced, I marked you as mine and I made it stick. There wasn't a boy or a man on that lake that didn't know who you belonged to, and the minute there was even a whiff one of them was stepping over the line, they walked funny for a week. — Lora Leigh

I think there's a sense of power women don't get till we're older when we say, 'This is the line, and you're not stepping over it. — Claudia Kennedy

A "snapshot" feature in USA Today listed the five greatest concerns parents and teachers had about children in the '50s: talking out of turn, chewing gum in class, doing homework, stepping out of line, cleaning their rooms. Then it listed the five top concerns of parents today: drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, suicide and homicide, gang violence, anorexia and bulimia. We can also add AIDS, poverty, and homelessness ... Between my own childhood and the advent of my motherhood
one short generation
the culture had gone completely mad. — Mary Blakely

Lift the demands of time pressure, though, and some of the true power of human cognition becomes evident. Given the opportunity, we often behave in a decidedly off-line way: stepping back, observing, assessing, planning, and only then taking action. It — Anonymous

I'm putting everything on the line in being able to express myself in a different way than rappers normally do. They might say, 'It's rap' or 'It's R&B,' but I'm stepping outside the box and making music for me and making music for the fans to understand me. I'm going the extra distance to be able to come across different. — Nayvadius Cash

Or, obversely, he might kill a man himself. It would be a question of throwing up his rifle, pressing the trigger, and a particular envelope of lusts and anxieties and perhaps some goodness would be quite dead. All as easy as stepping on an insect, perhaps easier ... Everything was completely out of whack, none of the joints fitted. The men had been singing in the motor pool, and there had been something nice about it, something childish and brave. And they were here on this road, a point moving along in a line in the vast neutral spaces of the jungle. And somewhere else a battle might be going on. The artillery, the small-arms fire they had been hearing constantly, might be nothing, something scattered along the front, or it might be all concentrated now in the minuscule inferno of combat. None of it matched. The night had broken them into all the isolated units that actually they were. — Norman Mailer

We started at once to dig our trenches, half of my platoon stepping forward abreast, the men being placed an arm's length apart. After laying their rifles down, barrels pointing to the enemy, a line was drawn behind the row of rifles and parallel to it. — Fritz Kreisler

Stepping back and connecting reconciliation to God's story also helps us move away from dramatic visions of fixing the world, as if our job were to provide solutions to problems outside us. If Christians believe anything, it is that no one - including ourselves and the church - is separate from the brokenness as an untainted solution to the problems of our world. The new creation contends with the old. The dividing line between good and evil runs straight through each one of us. So the journey of reconciliation begins with a transformation of the human person. — Chris Rice

The important thing is to build up my cardiovascular system, so I have the stamina to do stunts. To me, stepping over the line, taking a chance and succeeding is the ultimate freedom, be it in rock and roll or when executing a really challenging routine. — Wendy O. Williams

I believe that when all si said and done, all you can do is to show up for someone in crisis, which seems so inadequate. But then when you do, it can radically change everything. Your there-ness, your stepping into a scared [person's] line of vision, can be life giving, because often everyone else is in hiding ... — Anne Lamott

We want to believe we are good, we are different, we are better, or we are superior. But this body of social-psychological research
and there are obviously many more experiments in addition to mine and Milgram's
shows that the majority of good, ordinary, normal people can be easily seduced, tempted, or initiated into behaving in ways that they say they never would. In 30 minutes we got them stepping across that line. — Philip Zimbardo

It's not that I don't value my life. It's just that I love taking chances, testing myself, stepping over the line. — Wendy O. Williams