Tacking Quotes & Sayings

Into no other city does the sight of the country enter so far; if you do not meet a butterfly, you shall certainly catch a glimpse of far-away trees upon your walk; and the place is full of theatre tricks in the way of scenery. You peep under an arch, you descend stairs that look as if they would land you in a cellar, you turn to the back-window of a grimy tenement in a lane: - and behold! you are face-to-face with distant and bright prospects. You turn a corner, and there is the sun going down into the Highland hills. You look down an alley, and see ships tacking for the Baltic. — Robert Louis Stevenson

There's more to life than just surviving ... but ... sometimes just surviving is all you get — Charles De Lint

Near the Mexican border, rocky canyons cleave the mountains, laying them aside like broken wedges of gray cheese furred with a dark mold of pinon and juniper that sheds hard shadows on moon glazed stone, etched lithographs in gray and black, taupe and silver. Beneath feathery chamisa a rattlesnake flicks his tongue, following a scent. Along a precarious rock ledge a ring-tailed cat strolls, nose snuffling the cracks. At the base of the stone a peccary trots along familiar foot trails, toward the toes of a higher cliff where a seeping spring gathers in a rocky goblet. In the desert, sounds are dry and rattling: pebbles toed into cracks, hoofs tac-tacking on stone, the serpent rattle warning the wild pig to veer away, which she does with a grunt to the tribe behind her. From the rocky scarp the ring-tailed cat hears the whole population of the desert pass about its business in the canyon below. — Sheri S. Tepper

I knew I used food to cope with emotions, but just knowing it wasn't enough to completely stop it. That's why I created the twenty-second rule: Before letting myself rip into a bag of junk food, I forced myself to sit down and county to twenty. Slowly. During those twenty seconds I made myself answer a very simple question: What was really bothering me? Almost every single time, I came up with the answer before the twenty seconds were up. The next question was: What can I do right this minute to help fix it? Do I need to call someone to sort out a misunderstanding? Do I need to get paperwork done? Do I need to run overdue errands? . . .By the time I came up with something that I could do right at that moment my urge to eat had subsided and I was tacking the underlying problem. — Monica Seles

'One Tree Hill' will always be very, very special to me. It was my first television show. And my first gig in the business. It was surreal. I booked the role when I was 13. I had just started high school, and literally, I think, a week into high school, I found out I got the role. It was unimaginable! I learned so much from that show. — Kelsey Chow

How long were the stretches of toilsome tacking back and forth, of being blocked, of being thrown back again and again. But all that was annulled by the periods when I had my technique in hand and succeeded in doing what I wanted. — Kathe Kollwitz

She wished she could visit Mariam's grave, to sit with her awhile, leave a flower or two. But she sees now that it doesn't matter. Mariam is never very far ... Mariam is in her own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns. — Khaled Hosseini

The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny — Mark Twain

The true mark of a leader is the willingness to stick with a bold course of action - an unconventional business strategy, a unique product-development roadmap, a controversial marketing campaign - even as the rest of the world wonders why you're not marching in step with the status quo. — Bill Taylor

Experience can dull. With most men experience is a series of mistakes; the more experience you have the less you know. — Charles Bukowski

The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass to the play structure. His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time. — Michael Chabon

With docs, there's often a very direct communication between the filmmaker and the audience. With narrative movies, we leave it a little bit more open. — Tom McCarthy

On the whole, and providing one is in good spirits and feeling reasonably bright, it is not hard to converse for a short space of time on subjects about which one knows little, and it is indeed often amusing to see how cunningly one can steer the conversational barque, hoisting and lowering her sails, tacking this way and that to avoid reefs, and finally racing feverishly for home with the outboard engine making a loud and cheerful noise. — Virginia Graham

I'm coming for you.
- J
P.S. Please don't die. — Melissa West

Men are grown mechanical in head and in the heart, as well as in the hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force of any kind. — Thomas Carlyle

A woman will sometimes forgive the man who tries to seduce her, but never the man who misses an opportunity when offered. — Charles Maurice De Talleyrand

In due course we arrive, if wit can be said that we ever fully arrive. The truth is there are destinations beyond destinations and do the confirmed sailor goes on tacking forever. — Richard Bode

Room service is great if you want to pay $500 for a club sandwich. — Don Rickles

When I ran for the U.S. Senate the assumption was that anyone's name that was close to "Osama" doesn't stand a chance. So if somebody thought that tacking on "Hussein" in there would be a killer, then I think they underestimate the American people and the seriousness of the problems we face. — Barack Obama

The very technologies that were supposed to free up our time seem instead to be consuming it, tacking hours onto our already extended days. The very interconnectedness of life in a global networked economy that creates so many opportunities also makes all our decisions more complex, crucial, even fragile. — Sally Helgesen

Aboard at a ship's helm
A young steersman steering with care.

Through fog on a sea-coast dolefully ringing,
An ocean-bell - O a warning bell, rock'd by the waves.

O you give good notice indeed, you bell by the sea-reefs ringing,
Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its wreck-place.

For as on the alert O steersman, you mind the loud admonition,
The bows turn, the freighted ship tacking speeds away under her grey sails,
The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious wealth speeds away gaily and safe.

But O ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship! Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging. — Walt Whitman

On the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside of existing society. On one hand we have the day-to-day struggle; on the other, the socialist revolution ... It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers ... One is the loss of its mass character, the other the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform. — Rosa Luxemburg

As the master politician navigates the ship of state, he both creates and responds to public opinion. Adept at tacking with the wind, he also succeeds, at times, in generating breezes of his own. — Stewart Udall

I take a step toward him and grin cheerfully. With all due respect, I don't see the Republic tacking up wanted posters with your pretty face on them. — Marie Lu

I honestly just love Greek yogurt and honey, and berries, and some KIND granola or something because that's always something that I'm down to eat. But everything else, like anything savory just has to be ordered really last minute because I never know. — Chrissy Teigen

He could galvanize the dead with his talk. It was a sort of devouring process: when he described a place he ate into it, like a goat at tacking a carpet. If he described a person he ate him alive from head to toe. If it were an event he would devour every detail, like an army of white ants descending upon a forest. He was everywhere at once, in his talk. He attacked from above and below, from the front, rear and flanks. If he couldn't dispose of a thing at once, for lack of a phrase or an image, he would spike it temporarily and move on, coming back to it later and devouring it piecemeal. Or like a juggler,- he would toss it in the air arid, just when you thought he had forgotten it, that it would fall and break, he would deftly put an-arm behind his back and catch it in his palm without even turning his eye. It wasn't just talk he handed out, but language - food and beast language. He always talked against a landscape, like the protagonist of a lost world. — Henry Miller

If pitches were weapons, the majority would be B-1 Lancers or Navy Seals. The B-1 pitch is up in the clouds. It features a lot of hand-waving, cool PowerPoint animations, and use of terms such as strategic, partnerships, alliances, first-mover advantage, and patented technology. Typically, it's delivered by an MBA with a finance or consulting background. — Guy Kawasaki

Intention appears to be something akin to a tuning fork, causing the tuning forks of other things in the universe to resonate at the same frequency — Lynne McTaggart

Lately silence is my song of love. — Debasish Mridha

I had actually wanted to say something more, to express a wider gratitude for the meal we were about to eat, but I was afraid that to offer words of thanks for the pig and the mushrooms and the forests and the garden would come off sounding corny, and, worse, might ruin some appetites. The words I was reaching for, of course, were the words of grace. But as the conversation at the table unfurled like a sail amid the happy clatter of silver, tacking from stories of hunting to motherlodes of mushrooms to abalone adventures, I realized that in this particular case, words of grace were unnecessary. Why? Because that's what the meal itself had become, for me certainly, but I suspect for some of the others, too: a wordless way of saying grace. — Michael Pollan

All of the modern counseling vernacular is really not dealing with the root issue of idolatry. Someone or something's preeminent rather than God. — Mark Driscoll

When they'd gone the old man turned around to watch the sun's slow descent. The Boat of Millions of Years, he thought; the boat of the dying sungod Ra, tacking down the western sky to the source of the dark river that runs through the underworld from west to east, through the twelve hours of the night, at the far eastern end of which the boat will tomorrow reappear, bearing a once again youthful, newly reignited sun.
Or, he thought bitterly, removed from us by a distance the universe shouldn't even be able to encompass, it's a vast motionless globe of burning gas, around which this little ball of a planet rolls like a pellet of dung propelled by a kephera beetle.
Take your pick, he told himself as he started slowly down the hill ... But be willing to die for your choice. — Tim Powers