Teeter Quotes & Sayings

For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter. — Charles Bukowski

The President has not created any Ford constituency, unique from that of any Republican President. The one exception to this is that he does show unique strength with young voters for a Republican. — Robert Teeter

We have for the past year and undoubtedly will be for the next year, dealing with an electorate that is more alienated and more cynical than at any point in modern time. — Robert Teeter

His voice just shot through me. It's amazing, the things your body will do just when you don't want them to: heart speeding up, fingers aching. I'd always liked his voice, low and laid-back, the kind of voice that made you listen, a voice that still caused me to teeter when I heard it saying my old nickname. — Sara Zarr

I understand that one of the purposes of bipartisanship is to cram something difficult and necessary down the American people's gullets for which neither party has the fortitude to assume full responsibility. It's a way of turning a possible gangplank into a teeter-totter. — James Wolcott

We need a little more 'Hail to the Chief.' — Robert Teeter

I think he could have made most of the trips and gone to most of the fund-raisers if he would have avoided the partisan rhetoric and talked to the country as President in each of these appearances rather than to the narrow partisan audiences. — Robert Teeter

I am a dash man and not a miler, and it is probable that I will never write a novel. So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity and craftsmanship critics are looking for, and too little of the glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds. The men who have been in this war deserve some sort of trembling melody rendered without embarrassment or regret. I'll watch for that book. — J.D. Salinger

This is easy to say with the benefit of hindsight, but I think it once again points out how very important style of leadership, that is the way he does what he does, is to his perception. — Robert Teeter

The President, the Administration and the campaign need a theme. I am concerned that the President is seen as a tactician without an overall strategy of his plan for the country. — Robert Teeter

No, see the slide's too high. He could fall and get a concussion. (Wulf)
Forget that. He could rack himself on the teeter-totter. (Chris)
Teeter-totter nothing. The swings are a choking hazard. Whose idea was it for him to have this? (Urian) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

She was a free bird one minute: queen of the world and laughing. The next minute she would be in tears like a porcelain angel, about to teeter, fall and break. She never cried because she was afraid that something 'would' happen; she would cry because she feared something that could render the world more beautiful, 'would not' happen. — Roman Payne

She began to teeter as she walked, fell almost daily, bumped into things or, at the very least, dropped objects. She was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo. 'Pick me up,' is the message of a person who keeps falling. — Milan Kundera

onto his side and pushed up into a sitting position, tucking his head between his knees. Sensed the instability of the world long before he opened his eyes, like its axis had been cut loose to teeter. His first deep breath — Blake Crouch

People just automatically say 'If this guy is George and Barbara Bush's son, we don't have any question about those personal qualities that we were fooled on by Clinton.' — Robert Teeter

Some like to imagine
a cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,
mouthing 'yes, yes' as we toddle towards the light,
biting her lip of we teeter at some ledge. longing
to sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best. — Tracy K. Smith

People feel that decisions about their jobs, the way their children are educated, how their church functions, and products they buy are made by someone and some place so distant that they can't find anybody to talk to that has any influence over them. — Robert Teeter

As the society has gotten larger and more complex, individuals have lost their ability to influence any of the institutions that affect their lives. — Robert Teeter

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink. — Geraldine Brooks

He felt her shift her weight, felt them both teeter, and then they were tumbling into the pool beneath them.
Locked together, they went to the bottom, their mouths clinging to one another, their shared laughter in their minds. He kicked his legs strongly as she wrapped hers around his waist. Their heads broke the surface, sending rings of ripples skipping over the water.
She was laughing, catching his face in her hands. "You are so incredibly romantic, Jacques, I can barely catch my breath here."
His hands moved up to catch her buttocks, to massage suggestively. He raised one eyebrow. "Are you saying this was my fault? Woman, I never lose my balance. I needed to follow you into the water to keep you from embarrassing yourself. — Christine Feehan

While the President leads his potential adversaries in almost every state, his support is soft. He is seen as honest, sincere, just, and friendly but gets mediocre or relatively poor ratings being competent strong, intelligent, and a forceful leader. — Robert Teeter

We ought not to be looking for something spectacular but rather develop a plan in conjunction with the White House to work our way out of this problem over the next six weeks. — Robert Teeter

You think it's...like a prank. Like the time you and the guys soaped all the windows at the high school or rolled the football coach's car to the park and left it on top of the teeter-totter. What did you do, stay up late with a six-pack of beer, jerking off to porn, and then think I should put Caroline up here? — Robin York

Let's put a
chimpanzee in a tiny cage fronted by concrete bars. The animal would go berserk,
throw itself against the walls, rip out its hair, inflict cruel bites on itself, and in 73%
of cases will actually end up killing itself. Let's now make a breach in one of the
walls, which we will place next to a bottomless precipice. Our friendly sample
quadrumane will approach the edge, he'll look down, but remain at the edge for
ages, return there time and again, but generally he won't teeter over the brink; and
in all events his nervous state will be radically assuaged. — Michel Houellebecq

This person should not be directly connected with the President Ford Committee nor should he be seen as a member of the liberal wing of the Republican Party. He should be someone like Laird or Rogers Morton. — Robert Teeter

It makes sense that your response to a bad break-up line would be to set someone on fire," I responded. "Fire is magical to us because it embodies the passage of time. We can never grasp time because it is invisible, unreachable and continually slipping from our grasp. Do we live in the present? How can we? The present is infinitesimally small. It can't contain human action. We teeter on the brink between our assumed future...where we will be in moments to come...and our memory of the past...where we think we just were. The present doesn't exist in a comprehensible way. Similarly, fire is something we can neither grasp nor touch, yet it has a clear effect...the decay and collapse of life, the acceleration of entropy. Thus when we stand mesmerized by fire, we are actually mesmerized by our own mortality. — David David Katzman

Without a Mayaguez, or something comparable that we don't see in the immediate future, there is probably no one thing the President can do to himself to turn this situation around. — Robert Teeter

Most of the things that need to be said about the President are things he can't say himself. — Robert Teeter

This has resulted in more and more people becoming inner-directed and having as their only goal, getting as much as they can get out of the system and putting as little into it as possible. — Robert Teeter

It is my belief that it is not the fact that he traveled as much as he did during the past few months as much as what he said and how he said it that hurt him. — Robert Teeter

Many citizens see all the leadership of these large institutions together in a conspiracy against them rather than in any adversary relationship with each other. — Robert Teeter

For a moment Tess felt her strange, inappropriate happiness teeter. It was as though she were balanced on a narrow crevice surrounded by chasms of grief. One wrong thought and down she'd tumble. — Liane Moriarty

We need people out talking about the President, explaining, agreeing with and praising his actions. — Robert Teeter

Whatever he does should be seen as working at the Presidency and if he goes to Colorado for Christmas, it should be for a minimum amount of time, the family tradition and family get-together aspect emphasized, and it be seen as a working vacation. — Robert Teeter

If you embrace 'positive thinking,' you are - by definition - spurning 'negative thinking.' So it's as if you were on a teeter-totter and are trying desperately to put all your weight on one side - the 'positive thinking' side. — Srikumar Rao

There needs to be a planned series of speeches, interviews, etc., over the next two or three months by administration officials and other public figures talking about President Ford, what he is trying to do and what he has accomplished. — Robert Teeter

Another cause for the increase in alienation and cynicism is a feeling that too many policy decisions that affect individuals have been taken out of any system that has accountability or that they can influence. — Robert Teeter

The endorsement of respected conservative Republican officeholders and politicians is particularly important at this time as to destroy Reagan's credibility as a loyal Republican. — Robert Teeter

Also the fact that anything he does is seen and heard by the entire country, not just his actual audience or those who live in the region he happens to be in. — Robert Teeter

While only about half of the voters feel they know very much about Reagan or what he stands for, the Republicans who do have a very positive perception of him. — Robert Teeter

I'm sorry if I have the emotional stability of a teeter-totter right now, but that's better than you, who has the emotional maturity of a rock. — Chanda Hahn

It's hard to see a river all at once, especially in the mountains. Down on the plains, rivers run in their course as straightforward as time, channeled toward the sea. But up in the headwaters, a river isn't a point where you stand. In the beginnings of the river, you teeter on the edge of a hundred tiny watersheds where one drop of water is always tipping the balance from one stream to another. History changes with each tiny event, shaping an outcome that we can only fully grasp in hindsight. And that view changes as we move farther downstream. — Lynn Culbreath Noel

Normally Felicity liked to spend her recess holding the duty teacher's hand and tattling on kids who were breaking nitpicky safety rules like no climbing fences, no running up the slide, and no using the teeter-totter as a human catapult. - Zombiekins — Kevin Bolger

Her knee caught him between the legs with pitiless accuracy, driving the wind from his chest, making him teeter for a breathless moment, then bringing him down like a sledgehammer to a house of cards. As he slid groaning to the carpet in that special, shooting agony that only a blow to the fruits can produce, it was little consolation that he had been right.
His Queen was quite evidently a woman of rare and fiery passion. — Joe Abercrombie

The intervening years are sucked down these acheronian halls like light into a black hole while you helplessly teeter upon the event horizon, where time is measured by the beating of a fly's wing in the stagnant air. — Rick Yancey

The President's political travel is going to get blamed (and probably rightly) for a share of this downturn. — Robert Teeter

If success is really dependent on someone liking you or not liking you, and you have to teeter on that kind of tightrope of how you're supposed to act and how you're supposed to look and who you are, it's just not a healthy way to live. — Ellen DeGeneres

A noted cancer specialist in Boston said he believed that if some simple and inexpensive replacement for Chemotherapy for the treatment of cancer were found tomorrow, all US medical schools would teeter on the verge of bankruptcy, so integral a part of their hospital revenues is oncology, the medical specialty of cancer treatment — Barry Lynes

It's sort of like a teeter-totter; when interest rates go down, prices go up. — Bill Gross

A laugh jumps out of my mouth, surprising me. I can't even remember the last time I laughed and it puts me on edge. I suddenly want to do the same thing to her. Let her see how it feels to teeter on that cliff. — Nyrae Dawn

We should remember the campaign advertising will be only a smaller portion of the President's total exposure. — Robert Teeter

I think we need one recognized, respected public figure to make a tough, blunt statement on just what Reagan's record is and what he might do to the country, let alone the Republican Party before Christmas. — Robert Teeter

There are not enough people out talking about the President positively. — Robert Teeter

In the Buddhist view, I depend on you for my existence. All things depend on each other, equally. Welcome to the doctrine of dependent origination. It's teeter-totter metaphysics - I arise, you arise; you arise, I arise. Forget about our presumed Maker, the divine machinist in the sky. Take a look at this moment right now. You are you because you are not something else; therefore, what you are not - the chair beneath you, the air in your lungs, these words - births you through an infinity of opposites. It's like the ultimate Dr. Seuss riddle: Without all the things that are not you, who would you be you to? There's no Higher Power in this system to grab on to for support; we are all already supporting each other. Pull a person or people the wrong way and you immediately redefine yourself in light of what you've done to your neighbor. — Shozan Jack Haubner

Research has shown that the perceived style of leadership is by far the most important thing to most voters in evaluating officeholders and candidates. — Robert Teeter

Sure, I'm dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself. — Sylvia Plath

Look at the declining television coverage. Look at the declining voting rate. Economics and economic news is what moves the country now, not politics. — Robert Teeter

Sow flowers to make a garden bloom around you,
The thorns you sow will prick your own feet.
Arrows shot at others
Will return to hit you as they fall.
You yourself will come to teeter on the lip
Of a well dug to undermine another.
Though you look at others with contempt,
It's you whose body will be reduced to dust.
Humanity is all one body;
To torture another is simply to wound yourself.
[ ... ]Make your path straight now, by the bright light of day;
For pitch darkness will come without warning. — Rahman Baba

There are moments that define a person's whole life. Moments in which everything they are and everything they may possibly become balance on a single decision. Life and death, hope and despair, victory and failure teeter precariously on the decision made at that moment. These are moments ungoverned by happenstance, untroubled by luck. These are the moments in which a person earns the right to live, or not. — Jonathan Maberry

While these attitudes are more visible when directed at government, there is ample evidence that many working people distrust their own union as much as they do the corporation they work for. — Robert Teeter

Every person has only so much attention to give, and politics and government takes up only a fraction of what it did 25 years ago. — Robert Teeter

[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion. — Clive Barker

Fall asleep. Yes, you fall asleep. You are awake and then you close your eyes and thoughts press in and lucidity invades but then, eventually, you teeter on the edge of slumber and fall. — Maggie Stiefvater