Quotes & Sayings About Stilts

It is in vain that we get upon stilts, for once on them, it is still with our legs that we must walk. And on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own ass. — Michel De Montaigne

Ladies like improv stilts, and I think men like improv giant cocks. But one of the great things about improv is that you get to play some roles you'd never get to play otherwise, you know, like the old Italian pizza-maker who's passing on the business down to his son. You get to play it all when you improvise. — Amy Poehler

I'll tell you what's real. Real is that I was in jail for the past year, rooming with drug dealers and eating crap food your dog wouldn't touch. Real is not being able to wear your own frickin' underwear and showering with twenty-five other dicks every day while guards watch. Real is my next-door neighbor who walks like she's balancing on stilts because her leg is so fucked up from the accident. Brian, your perception of reality is totally off. — Simone Elkeles

And he has the teacher's fear of being surpassed by the student, the master's dread of having the disciple discredit his work. (Not that I am in any real sense Nemur's student or disciple as Burt is.) I guess Nemur's fear of being revealed as a man walking on stilts among giants is understandable. — Daniel Keyes

If you walk on stilts, you're still walking on your feet. If you sit on the highest throne in the world, you're still sitting on your ass. — Michel De Montaigne

After a seven days' march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foilage.
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence. — Italo Calvino

Judge not man by his outward manifestation of faith; for some there are who tremblingly reach out shaking hands to the guidance of faith; others who stoutly venture in the dark their human confidence, their leader, which they mistake for faith; some whose hope totters upon crutches; others who stalk into futurity upon stilts. The difference is chiefly constitutional with them. — Charles Lamb

In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don't want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf.
On the other hand, they demand that the president 'take control.' They demand that he hold press conferences, show leadership, announce that the buck stops here and do something. They want him to emote and perform the proper theatrical gestures so they can see their emotions enacted on the public stage.
They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn't control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn't make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn't want cuts, wants change and doesn't want change. — David Brooks

Weirdly, my nickname was Lady. I didn't get Stretch, or Stilts, or Spider Legs - I got Lady. I guess I was always a bit ladylike. — L'Wren Scott

This is what I decided:
Chloe is gone. She is never coming back. And the way I've been acting would hurt her. For at least an hour, I switch places with her in my mind-I am dead and Chloe is alive. How would she handle it? She would cry. She would be sad. She would miss me. But she wouldn't stop living. She would let people comfort her. She would sleep in her own room and smile at the memories as she drifted to sleep. And she would probably punch Galen Forza. Which brings me to what else I decided:
Galen Forza is a jerk. The details are hazy, but I'm pretty sure he had something to do with my accident on Monday. Also, he's a bit weird. Staring habit aside, he keeps popping up everywhere. Every time he does, I handle it with the grace of a rhino on stilts. So I'm switching my schedule as soon as I get to school. There is no good reason I should humiliate myself for seven periods a day. — Anna Banks

Friend, my enemy, I call you out. You, you, you there with a bad thorn in your side. You there, my friend, with a winning air. Who pawned the lie on me when he looked brassly at my shyest secret. With my whole heart under your hammer. That though I loved him for his faults as much as for his good. My friend were an enemy upon stilts with his head in a cunning cloud. -Dylan Thomas — Dylan Thomas

As for learning to wear high heels, no need to worry. I've got no tolerance for those dreadful things. If God wanted us girls tottering around like a bunch of drunken sailors, we'd have been born wearing stilts! — Jenny Lundquist

When I was Mare Barrow of the Stilts, I thought the same way. I wondered what would happen if I survived conscription, and saw what that future held. A friendly marriage to the fish boy with green eyes, children we could love, a poor stilt home. It seemed like a dream back then, an impossibility. And it still is. It always will be. I do not love Kilorn, not the way he wants me to. I never will. — Victoria Aveyard

Those who have made unhappy marriages walk on stilts, while the happy ones are on a level with the crowd. No one sees 'em! — Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie

Wagner took off a glove, "How dare you," he exclaimed while slapping in Nietzsche in the ear.

This sent Nietzsche's hypothalamus into overdrive. His frontal lobe shut down; he stopped thinking. Without delay, his arms shot forward, jabbing Wagner in the face twice.

"Oh yeah!?" Wagner screeched, losing his composure. He pushed Nietzsche into the opening that was cleared for the stilts walker. Unskilled in boxing, Wagner flailed his arms around Nietzsche's face. — Dylan Callens

Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked. — Walter Savage Landor

Whats the worst that could happen?! The worst that could happen is he could cut off your legs and use them to make stilts that look like legs! — Aziz Ansari

The landing stage stood on its high crooked stilts with only one person watching the boat disappear round the bend of the river - a girl of twelve called Ada, the wet-nurse's eldest child. As — Jane Gardam

It's only now you're gone I see how you're my reason for doing things. Now I'm a stiltwalker with the stilts removed. My emptied trouser legs flap in the wind and I can't remember how to walk without being precipitously propped. — Sara Baume

It's hard enough for women to walk on high heels. And I'm on stilts! — Aimee Mullins

It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump. — Michel De Montaigne

Here's the bottom line. I don't care if it was Kinko the Klown or a guy in an Uncle Sam suit on stilts or Hubert the Happy Homo. If — Stephen King

Don't be so foolish to believe empires are built on stone. They're on bamboo stilts at best. — Exurb1a

We came to Macun when I was four, to a rectangle of rippled metal sheets on stilts hovering in the middle of a circle of red dirt. — Esmeralda Santiago

I can't explain, maybe it isn't something that needs explaining, how the sight of a broken cage just puts you up on stilts. The promise that the cage will always be empty, that its days as a jailhouse are done. — Helen Oyeyemi

The gymnasium of running, walking on stilts, climbing, etc. stells and makes hardy single powers and muscles, but dancing, like a corporeal poesy, embellishes, exercises, and equalizes all the muscles at once. — Jean Paul

Mare of the Stilts died the day she fell onto a lightning shield. Mareena, the lost Silver princess, died in the Bowl of Bones. And I don't know what new person opened her eyes on the Undertrain. I only know what she has been and what she has lost, and the weight of it is almost crushing. — Victoria Aveyard

Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it. — William Hazlitt

Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.
What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,
And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher,
Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire. — William Butler Yeats

On still another road, a green-haired man wobbled by on peppermint-stick stilts; a fiery-plumed bird of paradise perched on his shoulder. But he's not in this story, so don't pay any attention to him. — Christopher Healy

In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant - the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. — Herman Melville

Nonsense on stilts — Jeremy Bentham

Tokyo is too close up to see, sometimes. There are no distances and everything is above your head - dentists, kindergartens, dance studios. Even the roads and walkways are up on murky stilts. An evil-twin Venice with all the water drained away. — David Mitchell

What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream"
that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts? — Douglas R. Hofstadter

I can barely walk barefoot. What made you think these walking stilts of death would be a good idea?" I chuckle out. — C.M. Owens

Natural rights, nonsense; natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, elevated nonsense, nonsense going on stilts. — John Stuart Mill

Princeton is a wonderful little spot. A quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts. — Albert Einstein

Any one may mouth out a passage with theatrical cadence or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts. But to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. — William Hazlitt

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense - nonsense upon stilts. — Jeremy Bentham

Cassidy's heart tried to leap out through his taught skin and hop into his wet hands. But outwardly it was all very calm, very serene, just as always, and it seemed to last a tiny forever, just like that, a snapshot of them all on the curved parabola of a starting line, eight giant hearts attached to eight pairs of bellows-like lungs mounted on eight pairs of supercharged stilts. They were poised on the edge of some howling vortex they had run 10,000 miles to get to. Now they had to run one more — John L. Parker Jr.

The old neighborhoods of Shanghai, Feedless or with overhead Feeds kludged in on bamboo stilts, seemed frighteningly inert, like an opium addict squatting in the middle of a frenetic downtown street, blowing a reed of sweet smoke out between his teeth, staring into some ancient dream that all the bustling pedestrians had banished to unfrequented parts of their minds. — Neal Stephenson

Because man's being is made of strange stuff.... — Ortega Y Gasset, Jose

My favorite place that I've been to that most people haven't been to is the Golden Triangle in the northeast of Thailand, which is inhabited by people as if in the Stone Age, without any form of power, without running water, simply living in huts on stilts. — Arthur Frommer

You at -all things considered- what you are. Put on your head perukes with myriad curls, stalk about on foot-high stilts, still what you are, you must always remain. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I do not think very highly of Madame D'Arblay's books. The style is so strutting. She does so stalk about on Dr. Johnson's old stilts. — Mary Russell Mitford

I have been running for so long. Since before all this even started. Even back in the Stilts, I was a runner. Avoiding my family, my fate, anything I didn't want to feel. And I am still racing now. From those who would kill me - and those who would love. — Victoria Aveyard

His shadow stretched out across the asphalt, a man on his way to make good an old wrong, his shadow, the dark doppelganger with stilts for legs, sliced in two by the streetcar tracks. — Hansjorg Schertenleib

Martin was a thoroughly amiable man, a man of wide reading, but when he came to write he mounted upon a pair of stilts, unusually lofty stilts, and staggered along at a most ungracious pace, with an occasional awkward lurch into colloquialism, giving a strikingly false impression of himself. — Patrick O'Brian

I borrow the stilts of an old tragedy. — Sylvia Plath

Often, after extinguishing the oil lamp in our house on stilts, we would lie on our beds and smoke in the dark. Book titles poured from our lips, the mysterious and exotic names evoking unknown worlds. It was like Tibetan incense, where you need only say the name, Zang Xiang, to smell the subtle, refined fragrance and to see the joss sticks sweating beads of scented moisture which, in the lamplight, resemble drops of liquid gold. — Dai Sijie

Beyond the town, darker than dark, King Haggard's castle teetered like a lunatic on stilts ... — Peter S. Beagle

I used to entertain myself - I taught myself to use stilts and juggle and ride a unicycle. But I was never immediately interested in theatre. — Tobias Segal

"Do you know," the Devil confided, "not even the best mathematicians on other planets - all far ahead of yours - have solved it? Why, there is a chap on Saturn - he looks something like a mushroom on stilts - who solves partial differential equations mentally; and even he's given up." — Arthur Porges