Quotes & Sayings About Thin Lines

There is a thin line between genius and insanity, and in Larry's (MacPhail) case it was sometimes so thin you could see him drifting back and forth. — Leo Durocher

The line of demarcation between democracy and monocracy is often thin, but rigid and stronger than unbreakable steel. — Mahatma Gandhi

Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.
[Libraries on the Front Lines, ALA interview 2011] — Neil Gaiman

Before the railroad's thin lines of steel bit their way up through the wilderness, Athabasca Landing was the picturesque threshold over which one must step who would enter into the mystery and adventure of the great white North. — James Oliver Curwood

The moor has always been part of my life. It's like a muse: the colours of the heather and the sky; how you can see the savagery of the wind in the way the dwarf pine trees are bent double, the bleak lines of the landscape in winter when everything save the moss and the grass are dead, stones like bones, poking through a thin skin of bilberry bushes, rushes reflected in black bog water. — Sanjida Kay

This was life though, wasn't it? Death made you crave life. The world is nothing but a bunch of thin lines separating what we think are extremes. — Harlan Coben

The difference between freedom and slavery is one thin line — Banksy

Satan's snares are mostly subtly laid and are the most tempting when the dividing line between right and wrong is so thin as to be imperceptible. — Mahatma Gandhi

Americans will buy anything, as long as it doesn't cross the thin line between cute and demonic. — Ian Shoales

Here was all about the visible-invisible borders, the thin lines between here and gone, then and now, here and there, random and meant, big and small. — Ali Smith

There's a thin line between destruction and creation. — Oliver Jeffers

I think the feature reporter often walks a very thin line between a truly human story and one that slops over into mushiness or sentimentality. — Charles Kuralt

Standing there small among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative. — Alexandra Kleeman

Lines are thin. So easy to cross. Impossible to uncross. — Karen Marie Moning

No sooner would such a temptation present itself than I would smother it. The effect was of snuffing out a candle, two candles, a row of twenty, until the lens pulled back to reveal an entire votive stand exhaling a hundred thin lines of smoke as a terraced offering before the shrine. In this religion hidden lights had been declared superior to those that glared. Somewhere I was storing up merit, accumulating the credit I'd need to buy, one day, the salvation I longed for. Until then (and it was a reckoning that could be forestalled indefinitely, that I preferred putting off) I'd live in that happiest of all conditions: the long but seemingly prosperous courtship. It was a series of tests, ever more arduous, even perverse. For instance, I was required to deny my love in order to prove it. — Edmund White

Handling a painful situation in a comedic way is truly the funniest. That is extremely real to me and not kind of clownish. There is a thin line though; you can't overdo it. — Will Ferrell

All of the films I have made, that I have chosen to make, are all about the thin line between good and evil. And also the thin line that exists in each and every one of us. That's what my films are about. — William Friedkin

Well, what do you think? Avanti?"
"Avanti," cries everyone, and, after a few quick re-tunings of our instruments, and re-initialisings of our hearts, we enter the slow theme-and-variations movement.
How good it is to pay this quintet, to play it, not to work at it - to play for our own joy, with no need to convey anything to anyone outside our ring of recreation, with no expectation of a future stage, of the too-immediate sop of applause. The quintet exists without us yet cannot exist without us. It sings to us, we sing into it, and somehow, through these little black and white insects clustering along five thin lines, the man who deafly transfigured what he so many years earlier had hearingly composed speaks into us across land and water and ten generations, and fills us here with sadness, here with amazed delight. — Vikram Seth

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

I notice faint scars on her wrists and forearms, thin lines too symmetrical to be accidents. — Isaac Marion

The difference between what we see and a sheet of white paper with a few thin lines on it is very great. Yet this abstraction is one which we seem to have adopted almost instinctively at an early stage in our development, not only in Neolithic graffiti but in early Egyptian drawings. And in spite of its abstract character, the outline is responsive to the least tremor of sensibility. — Kenneth Clark

More of the planet was unfolding beneath them as the Heart of Gold streaked along its orbital path. The suns now stood high in the black sky, the pyrotechnics of dawn were over, and the surface of the planet appeared bleak and forbidding in the common light of day - gray dusty and only dimly contoured. It looked dead and cold as a crypt. From time to time promising features would appear on the distant horizon - ravines, maybe mountains, maybe even cities - but as they approached the lines would soften and blur into anonymity and nothing would transpire. The planet's surface was blurred by time, by the slow movement of the thin stagnant air that had crept across it for century upon century. — Douglas Adams

There's a thin line between collectivity and chaos ... — Rita Mae Brown

I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words. — William Faulkner

Evening Concert, Sainte-Chapelle
The celebrated windows flamed with light
directly pouring north across the Seine;
we rustled into place. Then violins
vaunting Vivaldi's strident strength, then Brahms,
seemed to suck with their passionate sweetness,
bit by bit, the vigor from the red,
the blazing blue, so that the listening eye
saw suddenly the thick black lines, in shapes
of shield and cross and strut and brace, that held
the holy glowing fantasy together.
The music surged; the glow became a milk,
a whisper to the eye, a glimmer ebbed
until our beating hearts, our violins
were cased in thin but solid sheets of lead. — John Updike

Up on the bridge of the Anubis, the storm paws loudly on the glass, great wet flippers falling at random in out of the night whap! the living shape visible just for the rainbow edge of the sound - it takes a certain kind of maniac, at least a Polish cavalry officer, to stand in this pose behind such brittle thin separation, and stare each blow full in its muscularity. Behind Procalowski the clinometer bob goes to and fro with his ship's rolling: a pendulum in a dream. Stormlight has turned the lines of his face black, black as his eyes, black as the watchcap cocked so tough and salty aslant the furrows of his forehead. Light clusters, clear, deep, on the face of the radio gear . . . fans up softly off the dial of the pelorus . . . spills out portholes onto the white river. — Thomas Pynchon

You know, there's such a very thin dividing line between inspiration and obsession that sometimes it's very hard to decide which side we're really on. — Barnes Wallis

Here's the thing: we're all as thin as paper. Like those paper people you used to find in old children's magazines, inhabiting a two-page spread with other paper people, all of them hanging out somewhere together-at the park, at church, at school, at the mall, on the family room-until some kid took a pair of scissors to the dotted lines surrounding them and cut them out of their paper world. That's us, that's anyone. That was me. A cut-out paper person removed from the world I once belonged to. — Christopher Barzak

The kiss began much the same as usual
Edward was as careful as ever, and my heart began to overreact like it always did. And then something seemed to change. Suddenly his lips became much more urgent, his free hand twisted into my hair and held my face securely to his. And though I was clearly beginning to cross his cautious lines, for once he didn't stop me. His body was cold through the thin quilt, but I crushed myself against him eagerly. — Stephenie Meyer

Mr. Tulip lived his life on that thin line most people occupy just before they haul off and hit someone repeatedly with a wrench. — Terry Pratchett

It also meant mornings of glory such as this one, in which the snow, white almost to blueness, lay like a soft comforter over the hills, and birches and pines indestructibly held their ground, rigid lines against the snow and sky, very thin and very strong like Vermonters. — John Knowles

The films of The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar always seemed to me mere thin skims of the story lines, and I never did see a meager Hollywood caper called Youngblood Hawke, vaguely based on my 800-page novel. So it was that I opted for television, with its much broader time limits, for The Winds of War. — Herman Wouk

I most carefully confined myself to facts and arranged those facts on as thin a line of connecting opinion as possible. — Mary Kingsley

It is dangerous for a woman to defy the gods;
To taunt them with the tongue's thin tip,
Or strut in the weakness of mere humanity,
Or draw a line daring them to cross. — Anne Spencer

A thin line separates destiny from coincidence. — T. J. Stiles

The line between producers, songwriters, and remixers is so thin. — Stuart Price

Used well beyond her thirty years, a powerful weariness gnawed at her face this day. The taste of the land hung in her mouth, and worry lines etched deep ravines near the corners of her lips and eyes. Tall and thin, she wore her markings with a quiet dignity in much the way a soldier displays his bars. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.
Texas."
The Taken, November 2010 — Mike Kearby

I have often marveled at the thin line which separates success from failure. — Ernest Shackleton

Mostly, it was just me walking them. My own private Iditarod. And it wasn't a picnic. Just so you know, if you ever see a person walking four dogs, there are two things you can cross off your list of what to exclaim: (1) "Who's walking who?" and (2) "Looks like you got your hands full." Both lines are stupid and someone else has already said them. You might consider saying, "Hey, pretty girl!" or "Wow, four dogs sure make you look thin! — Julie Klam

I followed those highway signs and I've run down those thin white lines. — Jackson Browne

They dashed on towards that thin red line tipped with steel. — William Howard Russell

There is a thin line between the policeman and the criminal. The best cops are always crossed. The best cops are the ones who are able to think like criminals. But for a quirk of fate, they might have been criminals. — William Friedkin

There were black mountains on which nothing, no grass or trees, seemed to grow. Thin lines that twisted unpredictably, with tributaries arriving nowhere. Not rivers, but roads. — Jhumpa Lahiri

The line between fascism and Fabian socialism is very thin. Fabian socialism is the dream. Fascism is Fabian socialism plus the inevitable dictator. — John T. Flynn

I like writing better. Because I don't have to wear makeup, I don't have to be thin, and I don't have to remember lines. — Fran Drescher

He is a stem, a husk, barren and thin, withered by sun, erased by wind, emptied by seasons of dullness, marked by seconds of duty, scarred by regret only the faintest of lines dare to write out, which no one, not even him, can interpret anymore. People have told him a crow will reveal more than anything his face has to share. — Mark Z. Danielewski

Richard Grierson smiles, but it's an inward-pointing smile, a smile of someone folding himself back up for storage in the colorful corners of his own crayon fantasies. She looks at the books, their titles hazy with a thin film of sawdust, and she looks at the toy ships built for imaginary journeys along the red dotted lines of a child's map, and she looks at the exotic pictures in the books still open flat before her, and she understands that these places are just places of the mind, and she wants to be able to exalt his wild dreams and imaginings along with her own - but there's something about them that make them feel like the saddest thing she's ever seen. — Alden Bell

A face stared up at her from the mirror beside her hand. Was that really what she looked like? Was that really what she looked like, all sharp lines and huge silver-grey eyes? Certainly, no one would ever call those features beautiful, Jame thought ruefully; but were they really enough like a boy's to have fooled that old man the alley? Well, maybe with that long black hair out of sight under a cap. It was a very young face and a defiant one, she thought with a odd sense of detachment, but frightened, too. And those extraordinary eyes ... what memories lived in them that she could not share? Stranger, where have you been she asked silently. What have you seen? The thin lips locked in their secrets.
"Ahhh!" Jame said in sudden disgust, tossing away the mirror. Fool, to be obsessed with a past she couldn't even remember. But it was all behind her now. — P.C. Hodgell

Blood began to flow, at first cautiously, as if embarrassed by its appearance; a few thin red lines exploring the gravitational trajectory of its new terrain. Now it flowed faster, steadily staining her pale flesh a horrific red. — R.D. Ronald

Thin lips trace bold lines across my skin with a single, lingering kiss. — Cassandra Giovanni, Let The Fates Decide

Trios aren't really geared for slide unless you're gonna play chords, or play that simple George Thorogood style. It gets pretty thin when you play single note lines. — James Hetfield

Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept. — Lucille Clifton

Pedaling down the maple lined drive, quicksilver temper ebbed, her resilient spirits were lifted with the beauty of the day. The valley was stirring with life. Small clusters of fragile violets and red clover dotted the rolling meadows. Lines of fresh laundry waved in the early breeze. The boundary of mountains was tooped by a winter's coat, not yet the soft, lush green it would be in a month's time, but patched with stark black trees and the intermittent color of pines. Clouds scudded thin and white across the sky, chased by the teasing wind which whispered of spring and fresh blossoms. — Nora Roberts

The belt slid down her thin hips, and she nervously gripped at it, pulling it up. Short sleeves showed her very thin arms and big delicate elbow joints. Her body was all concave and jerkily fluid lines; it moved with sensitive looseness, loosely threaded together: each movement had a touch of exaggeration , as though some secret power kept springing out. — Elizabeth Bowen

There, in thin blue lines that could be called spidery, was the mark of Lord Nightshade - the — Michelle Sagara