Quotes & Sayings About Straws

There will grow from straws a mighty heap. — Ovid

Every generation of converts threshes over the same old straw. — Susan B. Anthony

Bendy straws are the shit, dude. — Kim Holden

At their time of life they should be wearing trouser suits and baking cakes, maybe spending their days penning hand-written letters of complaint to newspapers. Not drinking alcopops with crude straws in them. — Matthew Crow

This is what schizophrenia is: endless despair, endless, inconclusive treatment; endless clutching at little straws of betterness; endless realisation that that is all they are, is all there is. — Tim Salmon

We Built a Castle Near the Rocks,
we built it out of sand.
Our fortress was an ice-cream box
with turret, tall and grand.
Our men were twigs, our gun were straws
from which we'd sipped at lunch.
We had the best of wars ...
till someone's foot
went
CRUNCH!
[Joan Walsh Anglund] — Jack Prelutsky

Private prayer is like straw scattered here and there: If you set it on fire it makes a lot of little flames. But gather these straws into a bundle and light them, and you get a mighty fire, rising like a column into the sky; public prayer is like that. — John Vianney

You can't get anything worth having for nothing," Darnay declared, offering his guest a fill of tobacco from his pouch, "and faith is worth having - it's the only thing that can save us now, when the whole world has straws in its hair. Faith is worth working for." Bulloch considered this while he filled his pipe. "To — D.E. Stevenson

She speaks much of her father; says she hears
There's tricks i' the world; and hems, and beats her heart;
Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,
That carry but half sense.
(Ophelia) — William Shakespeare

"Alright, who's first?" Crystal asked once Carrie was in the chair that she had instructed her to sit in.
Everyone was quiet.
"Who wants to draw straws?" Matt asked. Carrie hadn't realized until this moment that the subtle smile on his face never faded. It was as though he found humor in everything that was going on.
Will slowly raised his hand, his other hand was left shoved in the pocket of his blue jeans, "I'll do it." — Julia Barkey

Whatever may be your desire to accomplish great deeds, the deep silence of pregnancy never comes to you! The event of the day sweeps you along like straws before the wind whilst ye lie under the illusion that ye are chasing the event, - poor fellows! If a man wishes to act the hero on the stage he must not think of forming part of the chorus; he should not even know how the chorus is made up. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I am wild, if you like; but I stayed in my burrow a long, long time, - nibbling your straws and snapping at your fingers, but always just a little out of reach. Until at last I got to trust you so much that one day I ventured out for a minute, - and you threw rocks at me. And I will never come out again. — Nancy Milford

Being a sick man is like being a log caught in a stream, Gilles. All the straws gather around it. — Helen Waddell

Wits and swords are as straws against the wisdom of the Darkness ... — Robert E. Howard

I have a bad feeling about this," she said.
"We'll fake it. And if push comes to shove, we can just sing Goober Peas and waltz around."
"Rebecca might not find that very funny."
"Rebecca is a Northerner. You can tell because there aren't any cheese straws on the snack table. — Mary Jane Hathaway

A plan of life?
... Yet you would smile at an architect who, having a noble structure to build, should begin to work on it in a haphazard way, putting in a brick here and a stone there, weaving in straws and sticks if they come to hand, and when asked on what work he was engaged and what manner of building he intended to erect, should reply he had no plan but thought something would come of it. — Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

He that hath one foot in the straw, hath another in the spittle. — George Herbert

Why don't I drink from a straw? Because straws are for suckers. — Abraham Lincoln

I paused, only just now realizing that the subject was hitting a little close to home. "You know, getting hurt. Putting herself out there, opening up to someone."
Yeah," he said adding some cheese straws to the cart, "but risk is just part of relationships. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't."
I picked up a box of cheese straws, examining it. "Yeah," I said. "But it's not all about chance, either. — Sarah Dessen

I'm a huge candy fan. My favorite growing up was always Sour Belts or Sour Straws. — Kendall Schmidt

There's this terrific kid in Maine who saw all the waste generated by straws handed out in restaurants. So he made up these little pop-up cards and asked restaurant owners put them on the tables to explain why straws wouldn't be handed out unless requested. Of course, the restaurant owners couldn't resist a 9-year-old kid, and so it worked. — Philippe Cousteau Jr.

This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world's first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths. Elliott's raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven day stretches. The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better. There were no distractions - no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least one hundred hours every week) of their feelings. When they got hungry, they sucked food through straws that protruded through the walls. As during Paul Bindrim's own nude psychotherapy sessions, the patients were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for one another ... — Jon Ronson

I am afraid we are little better than straws upon the water; we may flatter ourselves that we swim, when the current carries us along. — Mary Wortley Montagu

Trifles lighter than straws are levers in the building up of character. — Martin Farquhar Tupper

We cling to words like drowning men to straws. But still we drown, we drown. — Anna Kamienska

The size and shape of the birds have also made it impossible for commercial turkeys to mount and breed naturally. This means that workers at breeding facilities have to masturbate male turkeys, called toms, to collect their semen. Then, in rapid succession, the females are turned upside down and their legs secured by a clamp. The semen is put in straws and inserted into the hen. She's then released from the clamp, making way for the next in line. Not a pleasant process for the bird, nor a job one can take much pride in. — Gene Baur

I'm thinking about anything and everything. I'm making stuff up in my head, I'm using sense memory. Sometimes when it doesn't come and you've got no choice because you're getting paid to do it, you grasp at straws. It's always easy now with my kids. I just create some "what-ifs" in my head, something horrible that would devastate me as a mother. — Vera Farmiga

To say that the vote fraud conspiracy theorists are tilting at windmills is an understatement. They're using a legitimate public process to pursue an agenda that is, at best, grasping at straws and, at worse, partisan. — George Voinovich

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;
He who would search for pearls, must dive below. — John Dryden

Talking about straws and camels' backs is just one way of approaching things. If you have enough camels, no backs need be broken. — Idries Shah

You can't make Howard Dean a straw man. He is what he appears to be. And that's the beauty of Howard Dean. — Howard Dean

We have our mission and we are going to complete it. So grab your straws and suck it the fuck up. — Greg Rucka

The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback. — Nicholson Baker

Vince and I had reached the point where there was nothing else we could think of to do with the taco wrapper, and since he refused to draw straws for the privilege of telling Deborah, I'd been forced to make the call to give her the news that we'd come up blank. And three minutes later, here she was, striding into our lab like avenging fury.
"Goddamn it," she said before she was even all the way in the room, "I need something from you!"
"Maybe a sedative?" Vince suggested, and for once I thought he was right on the money. — Jeff Lindsay

It is impossible to live without hardship. The hardship of daily trifles, Ashely explains, ever accumulating and impossible to ignore, is so much meaner than pain or cold or fatigue. These annoyances make one weak and petty and shallow, just as greater struggles make one brave and wise. It's the little things that bring one down. Delayed trains and burnt puddings and drafty rooms. I was never so miserably cold on a mountain as I was in a drafty room. One can rise to dire occasions, but most of the time one worries about one's burnt pudding. It takes real struggle to see what life is. Then you realize you don't give two straws if your pudding's been burnt. — Justin Go

But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular
especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they're suppose to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place. Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The laws they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug. America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, or urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws. — Hunter S. Thompson

It seemed some pulp-novel version of a European hub, equal parts Renaissance-age Florence and modern day Paris with a heavy helping of Las Vegas and New York - at least, that was the way she thought of it. It was so far beyond description and unrelatable to any other place that she grasped desperately at straws trying to puzzle out how she'd tell the tale she'd no doubt live tonight. — Alaria Thorne

In fact, books are still being published by the lunatic fringe with the same explanation. In case this book should be read by some fundamentalist searching for straws to prop up his prejudices, let me state categorically that all my experience (such as it is) has led me to an unqualified acceptance of evolution by natural selection as a sufficient explanation for what I have seen in the fossil record. — D. V. Ager

two Lesbian Agents with glazed faces of grafted penis flesh sat sipping spinal fluid through alabaster straws — William S. Burroughs

I'm the straw that stirs the drink. — Reggie Jackson

People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws. — Thomas Pynchon

"It's rock star stuff. You wouldn't understand. Bendy straws are the shit." — Kim Holden

Why did one straw break the camel's back?
Here's the secret:
The million other straws underneath it. — Mos Def

Busta Rhymes the mighty infamous,
Always misbehaving and mischeivous,
Causing aggravation, I'll never pause,
Pushing out spit balls through plastic straws. — Busta Rhymes

I cannot go on ... All that I have written seems to me like so much straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me. — Thomas Aquinas

He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood. — Nicole Krauss

For oaths are straws, men's faiths are wafer-cakes,
And hold-fast is the only dog. — William Shakespeare

I've worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. In short, fate's distribution of long straws is wildly capricious. — Warren Buffett

A master of straw eates a servant of steele. — George Herbert

Pretty! in amber to observe the forms Of hairs, of straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms! The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare, But wonder how the devil they got there. — Alexander Pope

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and float on gossamer for deductions. — Alfred North Whitehead

Family tradition and genealogical history, upon which much of Sir Everard's discourse turned, is the very reverse of amber, which, itself a valuable substance, usually includes flies, straws, and other trifles; whereas these studies, being themselves very insignificant and trifling, do nevertheless serve to perpetuate a great deal of what is rare and valuable in ancient manners, and to record many curious and minute facts which could have been preserved and conveyed through no other medium. — Walter Scott

When a man's in love, he at once makes a pedestal of the Ten Commandments and stands on the top of them with his arms akimbo. When a woman's in love she doesn't care two straws for Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not. — W. Somerset Maugham

The Jews proposed the ridiculous story that the guards had fallen asleep. Obviously, they were grasping at straws. But the point is this: they started with the assumption that the tomb was vacant! Why? Because they knew it was! — Lee Strobel

Maybe the problem is that demons belong with demons. Because they're both takers. One takes from the other but she doesn't miss it because she's taking just as much from him. Like children with straws in each other's milkshakes." He pauses. "They would be as sneaky and mean in love as they are in everything else; but they'd also both be full and happy. — Eliza Crewe

He pretended it was the only thing that kept him from it. But, far back in his mind, he wondered if he could write anything. Often the question threw itself at him when he was least expecting it. You have four hours every morning, the statement would rise like a menacing wraith. You have time to write many thousands of words. Why don't you? And the answer was always lost in a tangle of becauses and wells and endless reasons that he clung to like a drowning man at straws. — Richard Matheson

The trouble with straw men is it only takes a single match to set them ablaze. — Andrew Klavan

Thanksgiving comes to us out of the prehistoric dimness, universal to all ages and all faiths. At whatever straws we must grasp, there is always a time for gratitude and new beginnings. — J. Robert Moskin

We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man? — Tom Stoppard

People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws. — Charles Bukowski

When asked about the survey, Buenos Aires's mayor, Mauricio Macri, dismissed it as inaccurate and proceeded to explain why women couldn't possibly have a problem with being shouted at by strangers. "All women like to be told compliments," he said. "Those who say they're offended are lying. Even though you'll say something rude, like 'What a cute ass you have'...it's all good. There is nothing more beautiful than the beauty of women, right? It's almost the reason that men breathe." To be clear, this is the mayor. Upon reading this quote, I investigated, and can confirm that at the time of this interview he was not wearing one of those helmets that holds beers and has straws that go into your mouth. — Aziz Ansari

Give that man a Pixy Stix," Haddie said. "A what?" Lucia asked. "Hold on." She left then returned a moment later with a handful of colorful straws, one of which she threw at Max like a dart. He caught it in midair. That impressed Haddie and she tossed him another, just to see if he could do it again. He fumbled that one. — Ellen Potter

when straws are all you have, you grasp them. There — Stephen King

In good yeares corne is hay, in ill yeares straw is corne. — George Herbert

Let those find fault whose wit's so very small, They've need to show that they can think at all; Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls, must dive below. Fops may have leave to level all they can; As pigmies would be glad to lop a man. Half-wits are fleas; so little and so light, We scarce could know they live, but that they bite. — John Dryden

That is one fireball of a girlfriend you got there. The OR team was drawing straws to see who would go out and update her and your family. I think she actually had them scared. — Jay Crownover

When you are desperately grabbing at straws all you get is a handful of weeds. — Stephen Richards

Mad raging sunsets poured in seafoams of cloud through unimaginable crags, with every rose tint of hope beyond, I felt just like it, brilliant and bleak beyond words. Everywhere awful ice fields and snow straws; one blade of grass jiggling in the winds of infinity, anchored to a rock. To the East, it was gray; to the north, awful; to the west, raging mad, hard iron fools wrestling in the groomian gloom; to the south, my father's mist. — Jack Kerouac

He glanced over at me. 'Scared? Of Reggie? What, she thinks he might force her to give up caffeine for real or something?'
'No,' I said.
'Of what, then?' he asked.
I paused, only just now realizing that the subject was hitting a little close to home. 'You know, getting hurt. Putting herself out there, opening up to someone.'
'Yeah,' he said, adding some cheese straws to the car, but risk is just part of relationships. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.'
I picked up a box of cheese straws, examinig it. 'Yeah,' I said. 'But it's not all about chance, either.'
'Meaning what?' he asked, taking the box from me and adding the rest.
'Just that, if you know ahead of time that there might an issue that dooms everything- like, say, you're incredibly controlling and independent, like Harriet- maybe it's better to acknowledge that and not waste your time. Or someone else's. — Sarah Dessen

Your lot in life? A lot is something you draw, like straws. It's chance. You didn't get this life by chance. You chose it on purpose. If you're dissatisfied from it, you can change it. — Jennifer Echols

Most people spend their lives building financial houses of straws, which are susceptible to wind, fire, rain and big bad wolves. — Robert Kiyosaki

Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions. — Alfred North Whitehead

When I was in eighth grade, I used a self-timing camera to take nude pictures of myself in various stages of erection. I then exchanged my biology teacher's slides with the images. The teacher, in a state of panic, kept rapidly pressing the 'next' button. It was like a pornographic flip-book. That was the last straw in a very heavy pile of straws. I was expelled, and I ended up transferring mid-year from boarding school to a public school near home. — Dani Alexander

You know crazy straws - they go all over the place? These straws are sane. They never lost their mind. They say, "we're going straight to the mouth. That guy who takes a while to get there? He's crazy." — Mitch Hedberg

I point at Drew, as I turn to Dawn. See? My sister finds her soulmate, and not only does she get rewarded with love and happiness, she gets free champagne flutes, and dutch ovens, and fifty-dollar checks. And what do I get? What do I get on a day when I still haven't found anyone to love? When I'm waiting by the phone for some jerk to call me, and acting like a crazy woman, e-mailing him at three a.m., clutching at straws that I might ever find anyone? Do I get gifts? No! I get condemnation from my grandmother, and I get to wear a dress that makes me look like a baked potato. — Kim Gruenenfelder

Those, that with haste will make a mighty fire,
Begin it with weak straws. — William Shakespeare

Tall and skinny, with arms and legs sticking out at odd angles, as if [they] were made of drinking straws instead of flesh and bone. — Lemony Snicket

For the briefest moment, they came face to face. Their eyes locked. Then he broke the stare, swiveled, sank into a sitting position, chains clanking, with his knees up.
She watched him speechlessly as he set a cooler bag between his boots, like he was settling down to a picnic or something. An image of the contents as hospital blood bags, complete with juice straws, flashed through her mind.
Unfolding her legs, she made herself as comfortable as she could on the cold outer edge of the sill. An intangible and unnameable charge electrified the space between them, and at first, neither of them said anything.
[ ... ] Finally she heard him unzip the bag and watched him pull out a small cylinder.
"I thought you might like some crappy ice cream," he said. — Kelly Creagh

In the time we spend reeling in confusion, grasping at straws trying to piece our egos together, we forget to acknowledge some things. Society created gender roles and categorizations and lifestyles and names and titles because we fear the unknown, especially when the unknown is us.
It's as though we're stranded in the middle of an ocean, but we were promised the current would bring us back ashore. We're given all we need on the life raft. As far as we can see, we're being led back, slowly. We don't know when we'll approach the shore, but all evidence points to the fact that we will. But we don't spend our time looking around, enjoying the view, seeing who came with us, and riding out the waves. We sit and panic about what we're doing and why we came here.
It doesn't matter where we started because we may never know. It matters where we're going, because that, we do. We begin and we end. We've seen one, so there's only one other option. — Brianna Wiest

A woman in agony of spirit might turn her head just so; a man in deep humiliation probably would wring his hands in such a way. From straws like these, drawn from completely different sources, the fabric of a character may be built. — Eleanor Robson Belmont

The whole life of Christ was a continual Passion; others die martyrs but Christ was born a martyr. He found a Golgotha even in Bethlehem, where he was born; for to his tenderness then the straws were almost as sharp as the thorns after, and the manger as uneasy at first as his cross at last. His birth and his death were but one continual act, and his Christmas day and his Good Friday are but the evening and morning of one and the same day. And as even his birth is his death, so every action and passage that manifests Christ to us is his birth, for Epiphany is manifestation. — John Donne

I missed the moment when time collapsed and memory was erased, replaced by finicky social experiments, lost in the blur of intoxication, sucked through multi-colored bendy-straws — Alex Gaskarth

Shortest straw pulls the skunk's tail. — Samuel Hopkins Adams

[Isaiah] preached to the masses only in the sense that he preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen; anyone who liked might pass by. He knew that the Remnant would listen; and knowing also that nothing was to be expected of the masses under any circumstances, he made no specific appeal to them, did not accommodate his message to their measure in any way, and did not care two straws whether they heeded it or not. As a modern publisher might put it, he was not worrying about circulation or about advertising. Hence, with all such obsessions quite out of the way, he was in a position to do his level best, without fear or favor, and answerable only to his august Boss. — Thomas E. Woods Jr.

An honest man you may form of windle-straws, but to make a rogue you must have grist. — Friedrich Schiller

I want the cheesy dates at the movies, the stupid walks at the beach and sharing straws in a cup — Tyler, The Creator

Our friendship is made of bendy straws, long midnight letters,
my so-called life marathons, sleepless sleepovers, diner milk shakes, apron strings, a belief in beauty,
sucking helium, and the most trust I've ever felt for anyone, including myself. — David Levithan

In the greater part of humankind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and effect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate. — Tanith Lee

A tremendous stream is flowing toward the ocean, carrying us all along with it; and though like straws and scraps of paper we may at times float aimlessly about, in the long run we are sure to join the Ocean of Life and Bliss. — Swami Vivekananda

Even the straws under my knees shout to distract me from prayer — Saint Augustine

Now the line is: Forget the classics, concentrate on an education for the 21st century! Which apparently means knowing how to operate electronic devices and figure out a spreadsheet. That's not education, it's vocational training. What once were means seem to have become ends in education. And our more with-it "educators" shift with every passing wind, clutching at the latest gimmick the way drowning men do at straws. — Paul Greenberg

Obviously, in marketing, the best tool is to show the autobiography in fiction. It's inevitable how that happens, but it's generic. Say I've written a story where my sister dies. 'Well, did your sister die?' No, she did not. But people use those straws to grasp at the difference between reality and fiction. — Dinaw Mengestu

Manage me, I am a mess, swept under the rug of yesterday's home improvement, a whimsical urge tossed aside for the easy reassurance of home and comfort. I am the photograph tucked away as a book-mark, in a book left half unread, once reopened to find memories crawling back into peripheral sight, faded, creased and lonely. I long to be admired, long to be held, torn and laughed at, laughed with, like a distant relative or an old friend breathing in their last breath. I missed the moment when time collapsed and memory was erased, replaced by finicky social experiments, lost in the blur of intoxication, sucked through multi-colored bendy-straws, making way for a spinning world where hub-caps stood still, but our vision didn't. If I could leave you with only one thing, it would be small, foldable, and made from trees, with a few careless words, scribbled in blue; Take a minute to learn me, take a moment to love me, because I need your love to live,and without it, I am nothing. — Alex Gaskarth

I knew I was catching at straws; but in the wide and weltering deep where I found myself, I would have caught at cobwebs. — Charlotte Bronte