Straggling Quotes & Sayings

The appearance of Professor Benjamin Peirce, whose long gray hair, straggling grizzled beard and unusually bright eyes sparkling under a soft felt hat, as he walked briskly but rather ungracefully across the college yard, fitted very well with the opinion current among us that we were looking upon a real live genius, who had a touch of the prophet in his make-up. — William Elwood Byerly

I'm a Russian and all I know of Russia is what I've read. I yearn for the broad fields of golden corn and the forests of silver beech that I've read of in books and though I try and try, I can't see them with my mind's eye. I know Moscow from what I've seen of it at the cinema. I sometimes rack my brain to picture to myself a Russian village, the straggling village of log houses with their thatched roofs that you read about in Chekov, and it's no good, I know that what I see isn't that at all. I'm a Russian and I speak my native language worse than I speak English and French. When I read Tolstoi and Dostoievsky it is easier for me to read them in a translation. I'm just as much a foreigner to my own people as I am to the English and French. You who've got a home and a country, people who love you, people whose ways are your ways, whom you understand without knowing them - how can you tell what it is to belong nowhere? — W. Somerset Maugham

The likeness was stricking. Not exact, of course - no man ever looks exactly like his father - but there was something there, no doubt about it, even with the younger man's beard and straggling hair. Something in the cast of the eyes and the bone structure, perhaps, or in the play of the expression: a kind of ponderous agility, a genetic shadow that was beyond the skills of any actor. — Robert Harris

Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted. — Herman Melville

Could the straggling thoughts of individuals be collected, they would frequently form materials for wise and able men to improve into useful matter. — Thomas Paine

The having originated a precaution which was already in course of execution, was a great relief to Miss Pross. The necessity of composing her appearance so that it should attract no special notice in the streets, was another relief. She looked at her watch, and it was twenty minutes past two. She had no time to lose, but must get ready at once. — Charles Dickens

Dinnertime!" It was Isabelle, standing framed in the door of the library. She still had the spoon in her hand, though her hair had escaped from its bun and was straggling down her neck. "Sorry if I'm interrupting," she added, as an afterthought.
"Dear God," said Jace, "the dread hour is nigh."
Hodge looked alarmed. "I - I - I had a very filling breakfast," he stammered. "I mean lunch. A filling lunch. I couldn't possibly eat - "
"I threw out the soup," Isabelle said. "And ordered Chinese from that place downtown."
Jace unhitched himself from the desk and stretched. "Great. I'm starved."
"I might be able to eat a bite," admitted Hodge meekly. — Cassandra Clare

As for Bessi, she spent her first human month in an incubator, with wires in her chest, limbs straggling and pleading like a beetle on its back. The incubator had a lot to answer for. — Diana Evans

The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel. — Harriet Ann Jacobs

Of all the books I have delivered to the presses, none, I think, is as personal as the straggling collection mustered for this hodgepodge, precisely because it abounds in reflections and interpolations.
Few things have happened to me, and I have read a great many. Or rather, few things have happened to me more worth remembering than Schopenhauer's thought or the music of England's words. — Jorge Luis Borges

A city uninhabited is different. Different from what a "normal" observer, straggling in the dark - the occasional dark - would see. It is a universal sin among the false-animate or unimaginative to refuse to let well enough alone. Their compulsion to gather together, their pathological fear of loneliness extends on past the threshold of sleep; so that when they turn the corner, as we all must, as we all have done and do - some more than others - to find ourselves on the street ... You know the street I mean, child. The street of the 20th Century, at whose far end or turning - we hope - is some sense of home or safety. But no guarantees. A street we are put at the wrong end of, for reasons best known to the agents who put us there. But a street we must walk. — Thomas Pynchon

It starts with a craving to fill the long evening downslant. There will be whole wide days of watching winter drag her skirts cross the mud-yard from east to west, going nowhere. You will want to nail down all these wadded handfuls of time, to stick-pin them to the blocking board, frame them on a 24-stitch gauge. Ten to the inch, ten rows to the hour, straggling trellises of days held fast in the acreage of a shawl. Time by this means will be domesticated and cannot run away. (In Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting) — Barbara Kingsolver

I'm too tired to fight against you anymore, too tired to say you are wrong. Too tired apologizing, keeping me uping all nighting- criming by wasting my precious timing. Straggling against what I once called charming. — Coco J. Ginger

He returned to Pinch, waiting for the mine whistle to break the day into pieces. When it did, the miners surfaced with empty lunch buckets, leaving the portal, walking the narrow main drag with its bank, post office, and commissary. They found their own company shacks in straggling rows three deep, each one identical, with the same stovepipe, same curl of smoke, same yellow dog lazing in a bare yard. its tail beginning to wag. — Matthew Neill Null

Why do I write? Because, I am able to create wonders with a click of my keyboard. I turn my computer on, and suddenly, I'm whisked into a world full of wonder and amazement. The universe bends to my will and defies physics. But when the afternoon arrives, I must return to my duties. I leave the comfort of my home and crawl through the elementary school carpool line. When I see the brightened faces of my children, my heart flutters, and I realize I can live with a few straggling toys ... as long as I can escape into the shower later. — Barbara Brooke

Then the clouds opened and let down the rain like a waterfall. The water bounded from the mountain-top, tore leaves and branches from the trees, poured like a cold shower over the straggling heap on the sand. Presently the heap broke up and the figures broke away. Only the beast lay still, a few yards from the sea. Even in the rain they could see how small it was; and already its blood was staining the sand — William Golding

It is getting toward dinner time and people are straggling back to their rooms with that weary, dejected air which comes from earning a living honestly. — Henry Miller

It was very still. The tree was tall and straggling. It had thrown its briers over a hawthorn-bush, and its long streamers trailed thick, right down to the grass, splashing the darkness everywhere with great spilt stars, pure white. In bosses of ivory and in large splashed stars the roses gleamed on the darkness of foliage and stems and grass. Paul and Miriam stood close together, silent, and watched. Point after point the steady roses shone out to them, seeming to kindle something in their souls. The dusk came like smoke around, and still did not put out the roses. — D.H. Lawrence

The snow lay thin and apologetic over the world. That wide grey sweep was the lawn, with the straggling trees of the orchard still dark beyond; the white squares were the roofs of the garage, the old barn, the rabbit hutches, the chicken coops. Further back there were only the flat fields of Dawson's farm, dimly white-striped. All the broad sky was grey, full of more snow that refused to fall. There was no colour anywhere. — Susan Cooper

It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked
And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun. — Wallace Stevens

Freedom is not an individual effort.
Yours comes only when you grant others theirs — Sergio Aragones

We shall not attempt to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedron nose-that horse-shoe mouth-that small left eye over-shadowed by a red bushy brow, while the right eye disappeared entirely under an enormous wart-of those straggling teeth with breaches here and there like the battlements of a fortress-of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth projected like the tusk of an elephant-of that forked chin-and, above all, of the expression diffused over the whole-that mixture of malice, astonishment, and melancholy. Let the reader, if he can, figure to himself this combination. — Victor Hugo

My dad said, 'Go to college and take whatever you want.' So, I went to the University of Miami. When I got up to the line at registration, I saw that you had to take math and history. I said, 'There's no way I'm taking math and history.' And right next to it was the line for the drama department. — Ray Liotta

to overcome mediocrity and live to our full potential. — Hal Elrod

The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn't understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived. — Han Kang

It was grey windless weather, and the bell of the little old church that nestled in the hollow of the Sussex down sounded near and domestic. We were a straggling procession in the mild damp air - which, as always at that season, gave one the feeling that after the trees were bare there was more of it, a larger sky ...
("Sir Edmund Orme") — Henry James

There is nothing wrong with the lives we lead. Sometimes it's best to just play your position, — Colby Taylor