Swerving Quotes & Sayings

Nigger, you sure ought to be glad it was us you talked to that way. You're a lucky bastard, 'cause if you'd said that to some other white man, you might've been a dead nigger now." I was learning rapidly how to watch white people, to observe their every move, every fleeting expression, how to interpret what was said and what left unsaid. Late one Saturday night I made some deliveries in a white neighborhood. I was pedaling my bicycle back to the store as fast as I could when a police car, swerving toward me, jammed me into the curbing. "Get down, nigger, and put up your hands!" they ordered. I did. They climbed out of the car, guns drawn, faces set, and advanced slowly. "Keep still!" they ordered. I reached my hands higher. They searched my pockets and packages. They seemed dissatisfied when they could find nothing incriminating. Finally, one of them said: "Boy, tell your boss not to send you out in white neighborhoods at this time of — Richard Wright

Panic is a synonym for being; in its delays, in its swerving and rushing syntax, its frantic lists and questions, it fends off time and loss. Its opposite is oblivion: not the tranquil oblivion of sleep but the threatening oblivions of sex and death. — Louise Gluck

Birdscapes moves rather like those swallows, dipping and swerving to pick up all sorts of items of interest. Mynott tells plenty of good birding tales, but these serve mainly to set off trains of reflection ... Reading Birdscapes is like going birding with a learned, witty, and somewhat irreverent companion who isn't satisfied just to check things off ... [D]elightful to read on a journey or a housebound day, and [opens] fascinating new horizons for anyone who wants to enlarge his or her interest in birds. — Robert O. Paxton

She flew at the roof, punching through and crashing through this floor and then the next, swerving now, crashing through a wall, sensing the alarm as Kitana turned. Then she was bursting through, barrelling past Doran and Sean, her fists colliding with Kitana's pretty face. She hit Kitana with the speed of a bullet and the poor girl's head came apart. Her momentum took Darquesse through into the next room, and she touched down, laughing. Back in a good mood. She stepped back through the hole in the wall. Doran and Sean were on their knees, staring at what was left of Kitana. — Derek Landy

You think when someone you love passes away, everything becomes clearer, that your priorities and perspectives align in a way they've never aligned before because of the sobriety of it all.
But it doesn't.
Those revelations just become skewed and distorted until you're forced to rewrite them entirely. You can't walk straight on a new path when you have too much luggage on your back. You just keep swerving, trying to find a way to accommodate the weight, but it's all dead and you know it's going to take you down. The only answer is to reroute.
-Emma — Rachael Wade

Ska," I said, swerving toward delirious laughter. "Great. — Gillian Flynn

I looked at her without replying. For me it had been more like being a passenger in a car that was going out of control. For three months we'd been swerving across the road, missing light poles and oncoming vehicles. Now the car was under control again, — Jane Smiley

The future is an imaginary solution to the problem of the present and the tarot offers imaginary solutions to the problem of our lives. It does so by having us swerving away from our remorse about the past and our anxiety about the future, into the increasingly rare experience of the present. The tarot is one of the fastest ways we have to get where we were not going. — Enrique Enriquez

The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following: Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road. Being sentimental is when the same driver, when swerving away from the rabbit, hits a pedestrian. — Frank Herbert

Ove looks at the group assembled around him, as if he's been kidnapped and taken to a parallel universe. For a moment he thinks about swerving off the road, until he realises that the worst case scenario would be that they all accompanied him into the afterlife. — Fredrik Backman

And once their imaginations are liberated, they begin glimpse the grand interconnectedness of all things. Eternity begins to peek out from behind the everyday things and they see the trappings of any earthly moment as the stage and props for Heaven to reveal itself. There is now nothing ordinary. Everything is being used and spun out for His vast scheme and in His eternal economy, nothing is wasted. Suddenly, all the myriad moments and minutiae of a lifetime show their orchestration - there was nothing that did not lead to this! They look over all their time to find that His redemption has always been rushing, swooping, swerving through their experience, racing to and fro to intervene and infuse Grace. — Geoffrey Wood

Then, in the next place, we must know that every being which is endowed with reason, and transgresses its statutes and limitations, is undoubtedly involved in sin by swerving from rectitude and justice. — Origen

I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as I lay the sausage against my ear. Abruptly, my cell phone went dead. A drop of grease dribbled into the dead center of my ear, creeping like a worm down onto my neck and below the collar of my shirt. A group of men and women in business suits walked by, swerving to avoid me. Across the street, a homeless-looking guy was staring at me, curious. Yep, this was pretty much rock bottom. As I was about to reach for a napkin and at least get my money's worth by eating the bratwurst while still hot, I heard it. Dave? Can you hear me? — David Wong

I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies. — Ben Marcus

I started to put my phone back in my bag when Ozzy yelled out, his accent so thick, I was only half certain he said, "Where the foock are ya goin'?"
Uncle Bob jumped. I must've turned on my GPS.
"You have to tahn the foock around. You're in the middle of foockin' nowhere."
"What the hell is that?" Uncle Bob asked, almost swerving off the road.
"Sorry, it's Ozzy." I grabbed my phone and turned down the volume. "He's so demanding." I pushed a few buttons to turn off the app, then put the phone to my ear. "Sweet, buttermilk pancakes, Ozzy, you have to stop calling me. You're a married man!" I pretended to hang up, then rolled my eyes. "Rock stars. — Darynda Jones

I especially love driving down a hill directly at a tree and swerving to one side at the last moment. That's my way to relax. — Boris Yeltsin

At every historical conjuncture, the present is not only present, it also encompasses a perspective on the past immanent to it - after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, say, the October Revolution is no longer the same historical event: it is (from the triumphant liberal-capitalist view) no longer the beginning of a new progressive epoch in the history of humanity, but the beginning of a catastrophic swerving off-course of history which reached its end in 1991. — Anonymous

Humanity, at any rate, does have free will, and in a most ingenious way Epicurus derived free will from the doctrine of the swerve of the atom, saying in effect that the power to make a deliberate choice of action was inherent in the atom itself, which demonstrated that power by unaccountably swerving from its "normal" path. — Titus Lucretius Carus

Give me yourself, O my God, give yourself back to me. Lo, I love you, but if my love is too mean, let me love more passionately. I cannot gauge my love, nor know how far it fails, how much more love I need for my life to set its course straight into your arms, never swerving until hidden in the covert of your face. This alone I know, that without you all to me is misery, woe outside myself and woe within, and all wealth but penury, if it is not my God. — Augustine Of Hippo

Any man who leads the regular and temperate life, not swerving from it in the least degree where his nourishment is concerned, can be but little affected by other disorders or incidental mishaps. Whereas, on the other hand, I truly conclude that disorderly habits of living are those which are fatal. — Luigi Cornaro

Instead of slapping her head, I do what they tell you to do: count to ten. Only I do it the gifted way: 123+456+789+10. When your sister has hurtled you swerving into the darkness, stranded you at a funeral home, and threatens to get you in trouble, just stop and count to 1,378 before you respond. — Jo Ann Beard

In a world of watered-down bestsellers and formula novels, Hitching to Nirvana eases back just enough to show the blade which cuts the real open, then bolts forward again, giving us a charged, swerving dance to self-actualization. Hitching to Nirvana is a magnetic forcefield, not just pulling us beautifully into the story, but into our own lives. It's rare when a writer can open the shared world with such a deft, personal touch. Janet Mason is a genius. — CA Conrad

Actually, all fear is born of the imagination, which means the danger we fear doesn't need to be rational or even real to be potent. Like my fear of snakes. When I was eighteen I drove my car off the highway into a ditch because there was a snake on the road. It didn't matter that the snake couldn't have bitten me through the car. It didn't matter that the snake probably wasn't even poisonous or might have even already been dead. It didn't even matter than swerving off the road at fifty miles per hour posed a much greater danger than the snake I was frightened of. Fear doesn't listen to reason. It takes its own counsel. — Richard Paul Evans

Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks - all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere. — Virginia Woolf

For Emerson, the value and distinction of transcendentalism was very much akin to this swerving and rolling away from acute definition. All the world is taken in through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes more, representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep stillness that is, whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists. — Mary Oliver

Shit, that's the exit, Deborah said, swerving hard for the off-ramp and effectively killing the mood, as well as guaranteeing that I lost all sense of what I had been about to say. The sign that flashed by, seemingly just a few inches from my head, told me we were heading for North Miami Beach, into an area of modest houses and shops that had changed very little in the last twenty years. It seemed like a very odd neighborhood for a cannibal. Deborah — Jeff Lindsay

As I was marginally less proficient on a bicycle than I was at particle physics, this involved a lot of swearing and swerving on my part, and a lot of exasperated shouting on his. As — Jojo Moyes

When you're in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you're not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you're not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn't failing; it's getting too comfortable. — Drew Houston

One reason I find all this character growth and narrative swerving so exhilarating is because I never got to do it when I wrote for TV. Our characters needed to remain consistent from week to week. — Maria Semple

In a physical contest on the field of battle it is allowable to use tactics and strategy, to retreat as well as advance, to have recourse to a ruse as well as open attack; but in matters of principle there can be no tactics, there is one straight forward course to follow and that course must be found and followed without swerving to the end. — Terence MacSwiney

Moonlight cast its gentle light before her, highlighting everything from the burgeoning garden to where cut alfalfa lay in wakes of swerving shadows. She kicked through it thoughtfully, remembering the first time. — Marcha A. Fox