Quotes & Sayings About Straight Lines

Relationships are not straight forward. They're not black and white. Sometimes things don't always going in a straight line, and that's okay. Love can be very confusing. — Danica McKellar

Nowhere is it ordained that history moves in a straight line. — Barack Obama

There is no motion in a straight line. A straight line infinitely projected becomes a circle. — Swami Vivekananda

See, we live in a phallus obsessed culture, where we're all brought up to believe that everything having to do with gender and sexuality somehow revolves around the penis. That's why so many clueless straight guys come on to dykes with pickup lines like "Once you've had the real thing, baby, you won't ever go back." Some men actually believe that phallocentric crap! And it's also why most people can't even talk about transsexual women or SRS without centring the discussion on the penis. But my desire to have SRS has virtually nothing to do with my penis. This is about my wanting to have a clitoris and vagina. But we don't even have the language to describe this desire. — Julia Serano

So many of the properties of matter, especially when in the gaseous form, can be deduced from the hypothesis that their minute parts are in rapid motion, the velocity increasing with the temperature, that the precise nature of this motion becomes a subject of rational curiosity. Daniel Bernoulli, Herapath, Joule, Kronig, Clausius, &c., have shewn that the relations between pressure, temperature and density in a perfect gas can be explained by supposing the particles move with uniform velocity in straight lines, striking against the sides of the containing vessel and thus producing pressure. — James Clerk Maxwell

Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were. — Philip Johnson

Art is the filigrain of a little mind, and is twisted and involved and curled, but would reach farther if laid out in a straight line. — Horace Walpole

The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring. Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work out a non-Euclidean geometry. — John Maynard Keynes

To the untrained (human) eye, Thalassinia looks like an expanse of coral reefs and volcanic formations. There are no straight lines or geometric shapes to give away the fact that the structures are actually mermade. (Get it? Mermade. Like mermaid, but ... oh, never mind.) — Tera Lynn Childs

Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line, makes people first curious and then indignant. — Stefan Zweig

When you are in the line of your duty, it is like standing in front of a line of posts, and every post is in line. But step one step aside, and every post looks as though it were not quite in line. The farther you get away from that straight line, the more crooked the posts will appear. It is the straight and narrow path of duty that will lead you and me back to the presence of God. — Heber J. Grant

One of the masked women imitates the sounds she hears and the ubiquitous tune, as she sways and runs her hand through her hair.
A rutting mare, a slender block of ice, warm for others but not for herself, she seems to be split in two: fire from the waist down, straight lines above.
Growing more sensual by the minute, more labile and smiling, her mask redder, flame is her nest, the flash of her eyes stony gray. — Homero Aridjis

Did you know that there are no straight lines in the universe? Life doesn't travel in perfectly straight lines. It moves more like a winding river. More often than not, you can only see to the next bend, and only when you reach that next turn can you see more. — T. Harv Eker

You throw a perfectly straight line at the audience and then, right at the end, you curve it. Good jokes do that. — Abe Burrows

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you look at a shape like a straight line, what's remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line. — Benoit Mandelbrot

Life is never a straight line - it's peaks and valleys. Why would you want to be the same person every day of your life? — Mary Chapin Carpenter

Revenge is never a straight line. It's a forest, and like a forest it's easy to lose your way ... to get lost ... to forget where you came in. — Hattori Hanzo

The walk liberating, I was released from forms, from the perpendiculars, straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds of thought into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight ... — A.R. Ammons

Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting. — Friedensreich Hundertwasser

There's no straight line to progress. — Barack Obama

After a few short years (fifteen, to be exact - brief by his count, interminable by hers), surrounded by all this vegetative rampancy, she was feeling increasingly unsure of herself. She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. As a novelist she needed this. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.
But here, on the sparsely populated island, human culture barely existed and then only as the
thinnest veneer. — Ruth Ozeki

But on Thursday only the committed regulars are there, and they do what they do on Thursday, delving into pagan rituals of worship to the amber gods that let you see to the lurching anger that spins you round and round at the center of things beyond lines and angles and the very floorboards become crazy under your feet so that the floor goes YAAAWW up again down again and suddenly tunk! it hits you on the forehead and your nose bleeds and you cling to it so that you don't begin to slip down it and fetch up against the wall where you were dancing before with all the women in your life who have now vanished and left you alone here and the swaying candelabra are like careening galaxies burning into the back of your head; you don't dare to roll over on your back and look straight into all those stars or you will be blinded; and from the cool floor and the smell of your own puke you gain more and more understanding of the universe. — William T. Vollmann

The phenomena in these exhausted tubes reveal to physical science a new world-a world where matter may exist in a fourth state, where the corpuscular theory of light may be true, and where light does not always move in straight lines, but where we can never enter, and with which we must be content to observe and experiment from the outside. — William Crookes

Nature doesn't move in a straight line, and as part of nature, neither do we. — Gloria Steinem

Style is a continuum. Style never changes. It's a straight line. It's a refinement of the same vocabulary. Style takes you from day to evening, season to season. — Ralph Rucci

It never meant anything, Moses says. Not to the god above it and not to the earth below it. It never did. Not even when they first did it. But it's the doin it that counts. It's something. You draw imaginary lines. That's what you do.
The Vestal looks at him kindly, a smile on her lips that seems affectionate--even maybe admiring.
Then what do you do with the lines? she asks.
And Moses looks at her straight and true. He says:
Then you pick one side or the other and you stand there. — Alden Bell

But I'm not sure it actually matters what we read. Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative. Maybe that's one of the reasons we enjoy it. — Anthony Horowitz

I honestly think that a Pavlik fight would be easier than Jones because styles make fights. He's one dimensional, comes in straight lines, I love that. — Joe Calzaghe

Creating lines that went straight into the interior [of a space station] was a recipe for disaster. Some knucklehead in an X-wing was bound to come along and drop an energy torpedo into your main power plant, and everyone knows how that ends. — John Ringo

Tell you what I don't like about a place so goddamned orderly like this. As an artist ... it's the lines that get me. All the straight lines in the walls, on the floors, in the corners that turn into boxes - like coffins. The only way I can get rid of the boxes is to take a few drinks. Then all the lines get wavy and wiggly, and I feel a lot better about the whole world. When things are all straight and lined up this way I get morbid. — Daniel Keyes

And even if Einstein could not be defied, he might be evaded. Those who sponsored this view talked hopefully about shortcuts through higher dimensions, lines that were straighter than straight, and hyperspacial connectivity. They were fond of using an expressive phrase coined by a Princeton mathematician of the last century: "Wormholes in space." Critics who suggested that these ideas were too fantastic to be taken seriously were reminded of Niels Bohr's "Your theory is crazy - but not crazy enough to be true." If — Arthur C. Clarke

To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out. — Rebecca Solnit

Life doesn't move in straight lines, and neither does a good conversation. — Margaret J. Wheatley

the Portuguese adage holds true: God writes straight on crooked lines. — James Martin

No straight lines make up my life; And all my roads have bends; There's no clear-cut beginnings; And so far no dead-ends. — Harry Chapin

It hurts when the one you love does not reciprocate your feelings. It hurts when all your efforts to set things straight go in vain. It hurts when you are unable to let go. It hurts when everything is rosy one moment and dark the next. All the emotions that are pent up inside you, suffocate you. The other person, it seems, has always been or becomes unemotional, unattached and either unaware or ignorant of your feelings. You are stuck at a place where there is no road ahead and you cannot find the road back home.

~ Lines from the Whispered Words article in June issue of Writer's Ezine — Arti Honrao

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial. — Martin Filler

Ah,steeds,steeds,what is steeds! Has the whirlwind a home in your manes? Is there a sensitive ear, alert as a flame, in your every fiber? Hearing the familiar song from above, all in one accord you strain your bronze chests and, hooves barely touching the ground, turn into straight lines cleaving the air, and all inspired by God it rushes on! — Nikolai Gogol

God draweth straight lines but we call them crooked. — Horace Mann

History gives us no clean, straight causal lines binding events and giving them clear order. History is a poem, not a syllogism. — Rod Dreher

On second glance, though, the activities didn't seem regimented or organized enough to have been put together by the Earth military. The EDF tended to lay out everything in straight lines and perfect grids. Conversely, this work seemed energetic and independent, as if each unit was following only a general master plan. — Kevin J. Anderson

A magnificent fireworks began: magnesium flares blindingly white, yellow, and then red, like dying stars; straight bright red streaks of machine-gun fire; elegant and clear lines of bullets traced like fugitive neon light; and scarlet, sinister rugged patches from antiaircraft artillery. Then the noise: after the solemn, promising silence of the flares came the mad disorderly reaction of the inhabitants of the earth to the regular, obstinate sounds of the invisible motors in the sky.
The airplanes replied to the nervous coughing of the machine guns with great battering blows that shook the earth. It was a celebration in honor of death. — Albert Memmi

I deliberately disregarded the right angle and rationalist architecture designed with ruler and square to boldly enter the world of curves and straight lines offered by reinforced concrete. [ ... ] This deliberate protest arose from the environment in which I lived, with its white beaches, its huge mountains, its old baroque churches, and the beautiful suntanned women. — Oscar Niemeyer

Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines. — Peter M. Senge

The straight line cannot proceed through the torturous twists of life. — Giambattista Vico

I walk the straight lines. I walk through the summer nights. I walk the silver rope of dreams. I walk through dawns of dawns. There's not a lot that isn't dying. I see people parading in front of each other like insects in a killing jar, watching each other die. I walk the straight lines through the Christ machines. Through the eyes of the throwaway people. Through the wards and the shores and the cracks in the skulls of the sidewalks. Through love's howling vacancy. I am the freedom soil. I dig my own grave. I resurrect myself every night. I am all things to myself. I walk the straight lines. I walk the spider's jailhouse. I walk the think line, the thin line, the white line and all the lines in between. I wish I could trade in my eyes. — Henry Rollins

People're always buried facing west, so at the end of time when the Last Trumpet blows, all the dead people'll claw their way up and walk due west to the throne of Jesus to be judged ... Suicides, mind, get buried facing north. They won't be able to find Jesus 'cause dead people only walk in straight lines ... Isn't no god better than one who does that to people? — David Mitchell

Understand this clearly: you can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool. — John Ruskin

I'd watch his smooth chest rise and fall with each steady breath, I'd watch the pulsating of his stomach when he laughed, and I'd never forget to make a comment or two about the wispy trail of grey fuzz that lined up perfectly centre with his body - and I thought that straight lines didn't exist in nature.
"Look at that old man hair," I'd say, purposely trying to get a reaction from him. Sometimes I'd even run my hand over his stomach so that he'd feel it.
He'd grab my hand to make me stop, or pretend that he was going to hit me as he laughed with me. "At least I don't have a grizzly bear ass like somebody I know. — Ashley Newell

The Labyrinth, a walled garden where humans tortured plants and flowers into growing in straight lines and sharp corners so unnatural that it hurt the mind to see, was east of Thorn's court, on the very edge of the Center Kingdom. — Jon Evans

If you have a clear goal and a plan to achieve it, your focus is fixed on a set course of action. Instead of becoming sidetracked by distractions and diversions, your time is focused on a straight line from start to finish. — Brian Tracy

Nature creates curved lines while humans create straight lines. — Hideki Yukawa

At thee seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky. — John Banville

It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly not have arisen if it had been known from the beginning that in Nature there are no exactly straight lines, no real circle, no absolute standard of size. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth is the shortest and nearest way to our end, carrying us thither in a straight line. — John Tillotson

A straight line is the shortest possible line between any two points - an axiom equally true in morals as in mathematics. — Maria Edgeworth

From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers. — Saul Bellow

Now, in Mr. Thornton's face the straight brows fell over the clear deep-set earnest eyes, which, without being unpleasantly sharp, seemed intent enough to penetrate into the very heart and core of what he was looking at. The lines in the face were few but firm, as if they were carved in marble, and lay principally about the lips, which were slightly compressed over a set of teeth so faultless and beautiful as to give the effect of sudden sunlight when the rare bright smile, coming in an instant and shining out of the eyes, changed the whole look from the severe and resolved expression of a man ready to do and dare everything, to the keen honest enjoyment of the moment, which is seldom shown so fearlessly and instantaneously except by children — Elizabeth Gaskell

Those who think only in straight lines cannot see around a curve. — Romina Russell

Straight lines don't exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature, so the human touch in the logo is that all the lines and forms have at least a slight curve. — Marissa Mayer

Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same. — Jeanette Winterson

You folk are so finicky about time, living it in straight lines like that. — Nalo Hopkinson

In fact, biology is chaos. Biological systems are the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process. Life does not choose the logically best design to meet a new situation. It adapts what already exists...The result, unlike the clean straight lines of logic, is often irregular, messy. — John M Barry

Our knowledge of stars and interstellar matter must be based primarily on the electromagnetic radiation which reaches us. Nature has thoughtfully provided us with a universe in which radiant energy of almost all wave lengths travels in straight lines over enormous distances with usually rather negligible absorption. — Lyman Spitzer

The sun appears to pour itself down, and indeed its light pours in all direction, but the stream does not run out. This pouring is linear extension: that is why its beams are called rays, because they radiate in extended lines. You can see what a ray is if you observe the sun's light entering a dark room through a narrow opening. It extends in a straight line and impacts, so to speak, on any solid body in its path which blocks passage through the air on the other side: it settles there and does not slip off or fall. — Marcus Aurelius

You could get the words all straight and neat between the lines, but the meaning was in the way they zigzagged toward a person when you gave them life. — Tamara Valentine

Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Q: What's hard for you?
A: Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. Math is hard. Reading a map. Following orders. Carpentry. Electronics. Plumbing. Remembering things correctly. Straight lines. Sheet rock. Finding a safety pin. Patience with others. Ordering in Chinese. Stereo instructions in German. — Tom Waits

Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground. — Terry Pratchett

Straight lines vary only in length, and therefore are least ornamental. — William Hogarth

I can walk the line, if it ain't too straight. — Joe Diffie

On the street they moved with purpose, at different speeds but in straight lines, like a thousand bullets fired at a thousand different angles from a thousand different guns. All of these people moving in the way they thought right . . . — Jess Walter

Erah Graesin had a silky, low voice. It was reputed to be sexy, but then, everything about Terah Graesin was supposed to be sexy. Kylar didn't see it. Oh, she was pretty. She had a wide mouth, full lips, and the kind of figure that was unattainable for the majority of noblewomen who spent their days doing nothing more strenuous than issuing orders to the servants. Maybe it was that she was a little too self-consciously good-looking. She wore lots of makeup - expertly applied and subtle, but lots - and had tweezed her eyebrows down to tiny lines. The truth was, she held herself like he ought to admire her, and it pissed him off. What pissed him off more was that to look her in the eye with his disguise, he had to stare straight at her admittedly perky breasts. Dammit, why were breasts so intriguing? — Brent Weeks

My mother was a restorer, she repaired broken things. I don't do that. I destroy things. I cannot go the straight line. I must destroy, rebuild, destroy again. My rhythm is not the same. My mother moved in a straight line: I go from one extreme to the other. — Louise Bourgeois

The straight line is godless and immoral. The straight line is not a creative line, it is a duplicating line, an imitating line. — Friedensreich Hundertwasser

His hair was shorter than I remembered, tawny in this half-light, the tousled edges casually framing the clean, commanding lines of his face. His mouth, normally so stern was relaxed now and as I stared a slight sweet smile touched his lips, its curve softening the straight strong lines of his nose and brow. Finally, inevitably, I met his eyes and felt a connection that seared straight through me, down through my soles and away. Those eyes, darker than mine, the darkest blue, dark and as impenetrable as glaciers. Tonight he was real, so very real that my heart thumped, my blood sang, my legs shook. — Hannah Blatchford

A house is very much like a portrait. I cannot disconnect houses from people. The thought of arrangement, the curves and straight lines. It gives an indication of the character at the heart of it. — Christian Louboutin

There is no straight line to a dream. — Jack Welch

I have never understood why so many gardeners favour straight lines and narrow, regulated borders; perhaps they think wildness could work only in a larger space. — John Burnside

Try not to make a straight line crooked. — Matthew McConaughey

And they dare to rule the world! They have made it so ugly. Square houses! Their obsession with straight lines and right angles has ruined the earth! They consider all curves, all subtleties, all softness, all indefinites, female, and they shun them. They have poisoned and denatured everything they touch, and expect us to be grateful. — Lucy Ellmann

Death Valley is the perfect flesh-grilling device, the Foreman Grill in Mother Nature's cupboard.

It's a big, shimmering sea of salt ringed by mountains that bottle up the heat and force it right back down on your skull. The average air temperature hovers around 125 degrees, but once the sun rises and begins broiling the desert floor, the ground beneath Scott's feet would hit a nice, toasty 200 degrees - exactly the temperature you need to slow roast a prime rib. Plus, the air is so dry that by the time you feel thirsty, you could be as good as dead; sweat is sucked so quickly from your body,you can be dangerously dehydrated before it even registers in your throat. Try to conserve water,and you could be a dead man walking.

But every July, ninety runners from around the world spend up to sixty straight hours running down the sizzling black ribbon of Highway 190, making sure to stay on the white lines so the soles of their running shoes don't melt. — Christopher McDougall

Ahead of them lay an expressway access road. Except that there were no guardrails or markings. No road signs either. And no other vehicles at all. Yet the road, following a narrow curve, led to a broad ribbon of asphalt tracing a straight line all the way to the horizon. Again, it had no lines painted on it and there were no signs. Rosa thought there would have been space for four traffic lanes on it, but it was covered with the dust and loose soil that had blown over it.
No other sign of life. Just the two of them, the car, and a forgotten road to nowhere.
"Where does it go?"
"To the end of the world. — Kai Meyer

There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature. Therefore, buildings must have no straight lines or sharp corners. — Antoni Gaudi

That's what happens in our hearts. The holes do not disappear, but scar tissue grows and becomes part of who we are. The same takes place in nature. As the famous Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi observed, 'There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature.' The most stable structures in nature - like trees or spiderwebs - have angular and curved lines. As our hearts grow larger, and we learn that scar tissue is not so ugly after all, we accommodate what we had thought would be unendurable. And we realize that the wisdom we have gained would not have been possible without the losses we have known, even those that seemed impossible to bear. — Daniel Gottlieb

Louisville, an hour after dark, is a carpet of gilt thumbtacks below them, with straight, twinkling lines like strings of beads leading out from it. Southeastward now, toward the Tennessee state-line. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

I think only of objects: of a leg or an arm, of the wonderful sense of foreshortening, breaking through the plane, of the division of space, of the combination of straight lines in relation to curved ones. — Max Beckmann

Physics has found no straight lines. Instead, the physical universe consists of only waves undulating back and forth allowing for corrections and balance. — R. Buckminster Fuller

If the earth were not round, heavy bodies would not tend from every side in a straight line towards the center of the earth, but to different points from different sides. — Johannes Kepler

The sharply precise divisions and boundaries, together with the fact that - wind and your more exotic-type spins aside - balls can be made to travel in straight lines only, make textbook tennis plane geometry. It is billiards with balls that won't hold still. It is chess on the run. It is to artillery and airstrikes what football is to infantry and attrition. — David Foster Wallace

Except in mathematics, the shortest distance between point A and point B is seldom a straight line. I don't believe in mathematics. — Albert Einstein

A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle. — Mark Twain

The car resembles a dragon fly or any other jumping animal that moves shorter distances in straight lines and then changes its direction at different points. — Fritz Todt

Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile. "The Great Bovine City of the World," breathed Lindsey in wonder. Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats. From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in everchanging cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killingfloor. — Thomas Pynchon

If the old man looked at straight lines to keep his act together, I was going to stare at curved lines and go down in flames. — Natsuo Kirino

McGovern is the only major candidate - including Lindsay and Muskie - who invariably gives a straight answer when people raise these questions. He lines out the painful truth, and his reward has been just about the same as that of any other politician who insists on telling the truth: He is mocked, vilified, ignored, and abandoned as a hopeless loser by even his good old buddies like Harold Hughes. On — Hunter S. Thompson

Seems like I've been here before, can't remember when I get this funny feeling, we'll be together again; No straight lines make up my life, all my roads have bends; No clearcut beginnings; so far, no dead ends. — Tom Chapin

Revenge is never a straight line. — Hattori Hanzo

She sighed as she looked around. Tell you what I don't like about a place so goddamned orderly like this. As an artist . . . it's the lines that get me. All the straight lines in the walls, on the floors, in the corners that turn into boxes - like coffins. The only way I can get rid of the boxes is to take a few drinks. Then all the lines get wavy and wiggly, and I feel a lot better about the whole world. When things are all straight and lined up this way I get morbid. Ugh! If I lived here I would have to stay drunk all the time. — Daniel Keyes