Quotes & Sayings About Top Down

I think it's all a facade. I think you wear a mask to show us, the media and the public, how you want to be perceived, but behind closed doors and deep down inside lies the real Shin Shaojin. A man who is so egotistical, maniacal, and so power driven that he would sell his soul to the highest bidder if it meant getting to the top. — Justin Bienvenue

There are many challenges in the global education ecosystem: from top-down systemic issues in how educational services are organized and delivered, to bottom-up issues of curriculum effectiveness, accountability, and human resource allocation. — Adam Braun

We describe the decision-making time like being stuck at the top of a high mountain; there are two ways down, one was to jump off the steep side and the other was to roll down the rocky side. In both cases, we knew we might not be alive by the time we got to the bottom. There is no easy or less painful choice, really. - A dad — Stephanie Azri

He grabs my hands and lifts them up in the air. I grip the railing on the top of the bed.
"Don't move those hands," he whispers into my nape. I nod and lick my lips. I'm on my tiptoes. My breath is catching and coming out spurts of rough air. His hands run down my arms. I shiver and pant. His lips brush the back of my neck. He sweeps my hair to one side, kissing down my shoulder blade. Heat and nerves battle low in my belly as his hands grip my hips, pulling me back to him.
"Don't let go of that railing, Sarah." His words are growled between kisses and licks. I hear the menacing threat in them. — Tara Brown

The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn't know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow's hands. — Will Rogers

[Donald] Trump and all the Republicans believe in the theory of trickle down economics which is a theory discredited even by the author himself David Stockton. The theory suggests that if we take care of the people at the top, if we cut taxes for the wealthy, if we make sure they are doing really well, then the investments that they make in the economy and the jobs that will create, will make everything grow and it will have a trickle down effect on the rest of us. — Debbie Wasserman Schultz

He pushed her jacket off her shoulders. It was warm in the room now, and she was comfortable in her sleeveless top. He skimmed his hands down
her arms, and he drew her against him.
"I missed holding you."
"I m sure you haven t been lonely without me."
He stopped and pulled her back. "There hasn't been anyone since I was with you. Believe that. All I did after you left was play ball and brood a lot. — Jaci Burton

The process of technological development is like building a cathedral," remarked Baran years later. "Over the course of several hundred years new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, 'I built a cathedral.'Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, 'Well, who built the cathedral?' Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful, you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else. — Katie Hafner

'Yea and I beheld Sisyphus in strong torment, grasping a monstrous stone with both his hands. He was pressing thereat with hands and feet, and trying to roll the stone upward toward the brow of the hill. But oft as he was about to hurl it over the top, the weight would drive him back, so once again to the plain rolled the stone, the shameless thing. And he once more kept heaving and straining, and the sweat the while was pouring down his limbs, and the dust rose upwards from his head. — Homer

We walk into my room, and I crawl onto the bed. I lie down on top of the covers, thinking he's making sure that I get some sleep. But instead of leaving, he climbs onto the bed beside me. "What are you doing?" I ask. He lies his cheek on the pillow next to mine and closes his eyes with some relief. "Taking a nap. — Susan Ee

I reached for her through the darkness, but she was gone. Like dominoes folding over, the rest of the mirrors collapsed down on top of me. The impact caused the world around me to vanish. — Ada Adams

But how can you be there for someone who doesn't need you? It's like trying to scale a wall without anyone on the top throwing you a rope. You just keep sliding down and eventually your muscles give out, and your energy and your will and your heart. — Katie Kacvinsky

At that moment, the Stanford Prison Experiment was changed into the Stanford Prison, not by any top-down formal declarations by the staff but by this bottom-up declaration from one of the prisoners themselves. — Philip G. Zimbardo

A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky, Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense ... [T]he wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain; But in my soul I plainly heard. Murmuring out of its myriad leaves, Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high, Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs - out of its foot-thick bark, That chant of the seasons and time - chant, not of the past only, but of the future ... — Walt Whitman

August 1
The harvest season has finally arrived. Today marks its opening. Our next stop on the wheel of the year will be the autumn equinox. I've always seen the opening of the harvest as a kind of stairway we walk down to reach the dark and magickal part of the year where all the good things await. The cool, comforting energy that feels more like home than any place can. Today is the landing at the top of the stairs. All we have to do is put one foot before the other, and before you know it, we'll be watching The Great Pumpkin again. — Damien Echols

I don't expect to get 100 percent of what I want, but what we can't do is go back to the kind of top-down economics that doesn't work. — Barack Obama

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who. — Kurt Vonnegut

I see companies these days where thoughts of "exits" are foremost in the minds of top management and board, and it is so clear that this value will infect the decision making down to the smallest choice by the most junior employee. Do we create something that is good, or just that seems good and might get us acquired or funded? — Brad Stone

I sat on a bench and my mother stood in front of me, looking down the track. Her hair was cut short, and because it had all turned gray when she was twenty-three, she always had it dyed a deep chestnut brown. It was that color all over except for a super thin stripe at the top of her head, where the gray showed through. Sometimes I wanted to touch that place on my mother's head, that thin crack where her real self had forced its way through. — Carol Rifka Brunt

People make the mistake of assuming far too many things about armies,' Lefevre told me one evening. 'They assume, for a start, that generals know what they are doing and know what is going on. They assume that orders pass down from top to bottom in a smooth and regulated fashion. And above all they assume that wars start only when people decide to start them.' 'You are going to tell me that is not the case?' 'Wars begin when they are ready, when humanity needs a bloodletting. Kings and politicians and generals have little say in it. You can feel it in the air when one is brewing. There is a tension and nervousness on the face of the least soldier. They can smell it coming in a way politicians cannot. The desire to hurt and destroy spreads over a region and over the troops. And then the generals can only hope to have the vaguest notion of what they are doing. — Iain Pears

It came down to the smallest things, really, that a person could do to say I'm sorry, to say it's okay, to say I forgive you. The tiniest of declarations that built, one on top of the other, until there was something solid beneath your feet. And then ... and then. Who knew? — Sara Zarr

All of a sudden, life became too much to bear. Just like that, for no particular reason. Because there was a child's corpse in the fridge on rue Parthenais. Because I had to start all over again from scratch, one more time. Because I had rolled my rock to the top of the hill and now it was rolling back down again. The times before, I'd always managed to put on a brave face. But there comes a time when you just don't feel strong enough to look for another place to live and go shopping again for clothes and dishes and cutlery and scouring pads and toilet paper. This was one of those times. When I got back to the hotel, I asked the Barbie at reception for the key to the minibar. It burned in the palm of my hand. I slapped it back down on the counter and ran out. I had to find a meeting. — Bernard Emond

It hurt the economic historians, the Marxists and the fabians, to admit that the Ten Hour Bill, the basic piece of 19th century legislation, came down from the top, out of aa nobleman's private feelings about the Gospel, or that the abolition of the slave trade was achieved, not through the operation of some "law" of profit and loss, but peurlet as the result of tyhe new humanitarianism of the Evangelicals. — Barbara Tuchman

Do you always play this hard to get?"
"I wish I could afford to play hard to get. You women have wised up a lot in the last decade or so. None of my old lines work anymore."
"You mean 'wanna get naked' doesn't have women falling all over you?"
Mac peered at her over the top of the menu.
"Hey, that's my best one."
"I'd hate to hear your worst."
Yeah, you would. He set the menu down and leaned in as though about to say something confidential. "I crash and burn a lot."
Mac and Rachel. — Suzie Quint

I went into the bends. I got drunker and stayed drunker than a shit skunk in Purgatory. I even had the butcher knife against my throat one night in the kitchen and then I thought, easy, old boy, your little girl might want you to take her to the zoo. Ice cream bars, chimpanzees, tigers, green and red birds, and the sun coming down on top of her head, the sun coming down and crawling into the hairs of your arms, easy, old boy. — Charles Bukowski

He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe?
Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?
It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. — James Joyce

They argue that, if the governments of developed countries want a fifty-fifty chance of hitting the agreed-upon international target of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle between rich and poor nations, then wealthy countries need to start cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by something like 8 to 10 percent a year - and they need to start right now. The idea that such deep cuts are required used to be controversial in the mainstream climate community, where the deadlines for steep reductions always seemed to be far off in the future (an 80 percent cut by 2050, for instance). But as emissions have soared and as tipping points loom, that is changing rapidly. Even Yvo de Boer, who held the U.N.'s top climate position until 2009, remarked recently that "the only way" negotiators "can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy."48 — Naomi Klein

I know, up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here at the bottom we, too, should have rights. — Dr. Seuss

It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top. — Arnold Bennett

Now, anybody who thinks that we can move this economy forward with just a few folks at the top doing well, hoping that it's going to trickle down to working people who are running faster and faster just to keep up, you'll never see it. — Barack Obama

It was the way he looked at me when he climbed on top of me that excited me the most. The look of pure dominance that told me that this was going to go his way and not mine made me so eager for it that I pulled him down gruffly toward me and kissed him deeply. — Yolanda Olson

When you're dying, the unicorn up in heaven gets a note from an angel telling her there's a person who's going to need a ride up soon. The unicorn finds out what the person likes. Favorite foods and books, colors and activities, pets and games. She gets a room ready for him, or her, near people who she knows they'll enjoy being with, maybe other friends and family who have died before.
When the unicorn is done, she jumps off of heaven's perch, flies through the blue sky, around the clouds, over any rainbows, and down to the person. She's invisible to everyone. She patiently waits. When the person dies, she gathers them up on her back, using her hooves and horn. All of a sudden, they sit up straight and smile, they laugh, because they're on top of a unicorn and alive again. They hold on tight to her golden reins and the unicorn takes them to their new home, where they're happy. — Cathy Lamb

We're workers, they say. Work, they call it! That's the crummiest part of the whole business. We're down in the hold, heaving and panting, stinking and sweating our balls off, and meanwhile! Up on deck in the fresh air, what do you see?! Our masters having a fine time with beautiful pink and perfumed women on their laps. They send for us, we're brought up on deck. They put on their top hats and give us a big spiel like as follows: "You no-good swine! We're at war! Those stinkers in Country No. 2! We're going to board them and cut their livers out! Let's go! Let's go! We've got everything we need on board! All together now! Let's hear you shout so the deck trembles: 'Long live Country No. 1!' So you'll be heard for miles around. The man that shouts the loudest will get a medal and a lollipop! Let's — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

What was this blight that had come down over the people she loved? Did she see it in stark relief because she had been away from it? Had it percolated gradually through the years until now? Had it always been under her nose for her to see if she had only looked? No, not the last. What turned ordinary men into screaming dirt at the top of their voices, what made her kind of people harden and say "nigger" when the word had never crossed their lips before? — Harper Lee

I spent the majority of time at school trying to break the rules. I would climb to the top of buildings; I even burned a building down once - not intentionally, just because I was interested in fire. I remember going through the rule book, ticking off the ones I had broken and looking for the ones I hadn't. — Simon McBurney

There is a saying for what it is like to "be at the top" that provides a clue to what the other proposal for the basis of life is. The saying is "It's lonely at the top." Why is it lonely? It is lonely because you have not been a friend to others on your journey to the top and you brought them down so that you could advance. And once you are at the top, you cannot consider anybody to be a friend to you, because you imagine that they are only trying to find a way to bring you down so that they can replace you at the top. Therefore, you are lonely because you have no true friends. And thus, there is the clue to what the other proposal for the basis of life is. — Ralph D. Sinn

To be an effective organisation, the structure of the organisation must be willing to adapt to a network model, leaving the old hierarchy model behind. We see the efficacy of the network model daily in many areas of our lives, and this greatly challenges the old from-top-to-down hierarchical model that many organisations have a hard time letting go of. But I suppose at the end of the day, it is a matter of survival. Simply put, in order to survive, one must adapt and to adapt today, means to take on a more networked approach to doing things in organisations, groups, companies and even in society as a whole (including politics). So in other words, in order for society in all of its forms from big to small, to move forward strongly, it must adapt to a framework that sees itself as a network rather than a hierarchy. — C. JoyBell C.

The Humpback Trail on New Zealand's South Island is really beautiful. It is a 70 km walk over about four days and is fairly arduous. You go through prehistoric forest and up to the top of Humpback Mountain, where there are amazing views down to the Tasman Sea. — Toby Stephens

When you break it down, Yahoo! is a Very Large Display Advertising business, with a hefty side of search and a bit of this and that on top. — John Battelle

Eventually Theo would pick up their daughter, kiss the top of her head, and carry her to an old spruce stump. He'd crouch down, gather up the beach glass that was still scattered there, and whisper in her ear. "Let's build a fairy house. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

It goes on top and breaks down,
It can emit a high or low sound.
Each atom of such noisy chute
Exhale the aroma of a ripe fruit. — Ana Claudia Antunes

In the middle of the night, I was startled awake by the sharp smell of tequila. My eyes snapped open. The heath bush I'd transplanted from an alley off Divisadero stretched its needled arms over my head. Between the new growth and glowing bell-shaped blossoms, I saw the outline of a man bend over and snap a stem of my helenium. His tequila bottle leaned over as he did, alcohol splashing out of the top and landing on the shrub concealing my body. A girl behind him reached for the bottle. She sat down on the ground with her back to me and tilted her face to the sky. — Vanessa Diffenbaugh

I want you to inject this into a red-top Vacutainer and spin it down." "Okay. What tests do you want done?" "A CBC and a standard Chem-20. But don't throw any serum away. I may do some more tests, — Greg Iles

I ordered my favorite drink; vanilla iced blended coffee with whipped cream and caramel sauce on top. The whipped cream and caramel sauce were the best. Usually when no one was watching, I would lick the inside of the lid to get every last drop of the addictive syrup. Once, my dad caught me doing this and started laughing. I'd gotten caramel plastered over my nose. If Colt had ever seen me do this, I would never live it down. Glancing around, I indulged shamelessly and grinned. -Cheyenne — Lisa L. Wiedmeier

top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom. The greater the need to improvise, the more democratic the cooperation tends to become. — David Graeber

Deep caring about each other's fate does seem to be on the decline, but I do not believe that New Age narcissism is much to blame. The external causes of our moral indifference are a fragmented mass society that leaves us isolated and afraid, an economic system that puts the rights of capital before the rights of people, and a political process that makes citizens into ciphers.

These are the forces that allow, even encourage, unbridled competition, social irresponsibility, and the survival of the financially fittest. The executives who brought down the major corporations by taking indecent sums off the top while wage earners of modest means lost their retirement accounts were clearly more influenced by capitalist amorality than by some New Age guru. — Parker J. Palmer

I knew from the beginning that we'd be addicted after all." His amber eyes bore straight through me. "I just didn't know whether we'd be at a better place than we were before."
We are. I don't even have to say the words. He knows the answer too. We're at the best place we've ever been, reaching a stasis together. It's beautiful up here, and even if I fear falling, it's nice to know I've been down that road before. And I can always walk to the top again. — Krista Ritchie

In May, when the grass was so green it hurt to look at it, the air so overpoweringly sweet you had to go in and turn on the television just to dull your senses- that's when Claire knew it was time to look for the asparagus in the pastures. If it rained she wondered if she should check our secret places for morels. In June, when the strawberries ripened, we made hay and the girls rode on top of the wagon. I was ever mindful of the boy who had fallen off and broken his neck. In July, the pink raspberries, all in brambles in the woods and growing up our front porch, turned black and tart. In August, the sour apples were the coming thing. In September there were the crippled-up pears in the old orchard. In October, we picked the pumpkin and popcorn. And all winter, when there was snow, we lived for the wild trip down the slopes on the toboggan. — Jane Hamilton

You been forgetting Who's in charge and who ain't. So here's what I'm gone do: I'm gone send a storm so big it rips the roof off the shed where you keep that mule you so proud of. Then I'm gone send hail big as walnuts down on that mule, making it break its leg trying to bust out of there. Then, just so you know for sure it's Me you dealing with, the next morning after you put that mule down and buried it and you up on the ladder trying to nail the roof back onto the shed I'm gone to let that weak top rung, the one you ain't got around to fixing yet, I'm gone let it rot all the way through so you fall off and break your own leg, and I'm gone to send Florence and Lilly Mae to a birthing and the twins out to the far end of the field so you laying there half the day. That'll give you time to think real hard on what I been trying to tell you. — Hillary Jordan

Certainly it's all in bloom, certainly we'll go. For aren't you and I gods? ... I sense in my blood the rotation of unexplorable universes ...
Listen - I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator.
Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life. — Vladimir Nabokov

Along the Oregon coast an arm of the Pacific shushes softly against rocky shores. Above the waves, dripping silver in the moonlight, old trees, giant trees, few now, thrust their heads among low clouds, the moss thick upon their boles and shadow deep around their roots. In these woods nights are quiet, save for the questing hoot of an owl, the satin stroke of fur against a twig, the tick and rasp of small claws climbing up, clambering down. In these woods, bear is the big boy, the top of the chain, but even he goes quietly and mostly by day. It is a place of mosses and liverworts and ferns, of filmy green that curtains the branches and cushions the soil, a wet place, a still place. — Sheri S. Tepper

There are cases where government-to-government aid actually has worked. Look at the eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio. But these are really top down solutions that require government-to-government support and aid. — Jacqueline Novogratz

You're probably wondering why there's never any good news.
I mean, I've been doing this job a few months now. I've been soaking up the paper every week, same as you, and watching the same newsfeeds as you. I got the same list burned into the front of my head as you. Death. Horror. Bad sex. Living nightmares. Each day a little further down the spiral.
There's never any good news because they know you.
I mean, here's the top of today's column that I discarded: I had a really good time last night down the bar with my assistant and some cheerfully doomed sex fiends of our acquaintance.
No one ever sold newspapers by telling you the truth; life just ain't that bad. — Warren Ellis

Schools in which students and teachers relate as partners-where Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication is part of every interaction are communities of learning, rather than top-down, impersonal factories. Young people begin to see school as a safe and exciting place of exploration where they can share feelings and ideas, and where each child is recognized, valued and nurtured. — Riane Eisler

You ain't old yet but when you get old, all the women in the village start to look down on you when they find out you want to do something other than sweep the kitchen or cut up vegetables. Had this big starch mango tree when I was small. Anytime I set myself to climb it, there was always a woman passing by to yell at me and tell me to get down. Asked me why I leaving my poor mother to do all the housework. I never got to the top. It was like God was always watching, ready to send another hag to tell me down. Then, one day, they cut down the tree. — Kevin Jared Hosein

This kind of inequality - a level we haven't seen since the Great Depression - hurts us all. When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, it drags down the entire economy, from top to bottom. America was built on the idea of broad-based prosperity - that's why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so that they could buy the cars they made. It's also why a recent study showed that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run. — Barack Obama

I know that government doesn't have the all solutions that real solutions do not come from the top down. Instead, the ways to end poverty come from all of us. We are part of the solution. — Kathleen Blanco

I live completely without regret. Sure there are plenty of things that someone could second guess, but I see the path of life like driving down the road without a map. The thing is, some dark alleys open up in majestic places, and some bright and shiny highways to the top end in cliffs to the bottom. You never know until you get there. What I know for sure is that if many years ago I actually had a map to the path of life, the destination that I would have chosen is right here, with this family, in this place, and with these smiles. That makes anything that could have been regretful, the best decision in the world. — Michael A. Wood Jr.

I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the queen of the sciences up on top, down through a bunch of squishy subjects, ending up with sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering. — Richard Lewontin

I had a notepad and I wrote down 30 things to make myself better just off the top of my head, and the next day I started to do that. — Kenny Chesney

Your nipples are like Novocain."
"You're at a distinct advantage because I have no idea what controlled substance your nipples are like." He ran his tongue across his top teeth. — Debra Anastasia

That's how I stay on top baby. i look at life from every position. I play from every side. you gotta know what each man on the board is thinking down to the littlest mutherfucker like the pawn — Sister Souljah

I saw a huge steam roller,
It blotted out the sun.
The people all lay down, lay down;
They did not try to run.
My love and I, we looked amazed
Upon the gory mystery.
"Lie down, lie down!" the people cried.
"The great machine is history!"
My love and I, we ran away,
The engine did not find us.
We ran up to a mountain top,
Left history far behind us.
Perhaps we should have stayed and died,
But somehow we don't think so.
We went to see where history'd been,
And my, the dead did stink so. — Kurt Vonnegut

He encouraged me to take one more deep puff and hold it in, so I did, and the smoke traveled down on top of my esophagus and then did a U-turn up into where my brain was supposed to be. At first it felt like fireworks, and then I began to feel like I was floating down a stream. I liked it. And I took another puff and studied my ass off. The next morning, however, I would fail my very first Spanish exam, because I would not remember how to conjugate anything except Abraham. — Terry McMillan

Racing takes so much determination, guts, and sacrifice to be on top. I once craved, lived, and breathed racing. I can honestly say now, I'm ready to slow down and enjoy my life. Maybe I'll cut loose and have a cheeseburger or some pizza. Those types of indulgencies are not allowed when you constantly have to monitor your weight. — Chantal Sutherland

So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top. — Thomas Dolby

As an HR Manager, you don't have to build a top-down perks program. You decide how much you want to invest in your employees, and then you give your employees the control to build a custom perk package for themselves. — Paige Craig

There are more effective ways of tackling environmental problems including global warming, proliferation of plastics, urban sprawl, and the loss of biodiversity than by treaties, top-down regulations, and other approaches offered by big governments and their dependents. — Preston Manning

And Jazz snapped.
He didn't snap the way a normal person might snap. A normal person would fling his arms around and stomp his feet and rant at the top of his lungs, bellowing to the sky. There might be tears, from a normal person.
Jazz went quiet. He darted out one hand and grabbed the wrist of the paramedic who had been trying to cuff him and pulled the man close, holding his gaze.
In a moment, he channeled every last drop of (his father).
Who am I? I'll tell you. I'm the local psychopath, and if you don't save my best friend's life, I will hunt down everyone you've ever cared about in your life and make you watch while I do things to them that will have you begging me to kill them. That's who I am. — Barry Lyga

He couldn't believe it!
He knew her intent before she dove for her sgian dubh. But he couldn't react quickly enough. He wasn't about to allow her to arm herself again. He dropped his sword, needing both hands free and lunged for her, only with his body this time. Tackling her, he took her down, her back cushioned by the wealth of leaves, and planted his body on top of hers.
She grew very still then, and he smiled a little at her. "If you had done just as I asked, we wouldna be like this, now would we lassie?"
Sorcha was fuming mad and scared witless as the braw Highlander pressed his body on top of hers. She felt his staff growing against her belly the longer he remained between her legs. He was beautiful, his dark brown eyes swimming with lust, his long brown hair hanging about her face as she looked up at him, panting for breath, trembling, despite wishing to show he didn't frighten her one bit. But he did. — Terry Spear

[Olive's] left foot was bleeding through a wide swath of bandages onto the tarp it was resting on. The bowl next to her was full of blood.
Olive looked a little pale. "I don't think I should move," she said.
"What are you doing?" Roger shut the door behind him and stood with his back to it.
"I decided I might try to eat my toes," Olive said, closing her eyes. "But now that I've started, I don't think I should move."
Roger pushed himself off the wall and knelt down next to her. He unbuckled her silver belt and reached with it under her dress. He looped the belt around the top of her leg and tightened it. His hands were not shaking.
"Sit on the loose end," he said, pushing it under her. "I hope that works."
"You brought flowers," she said, blinking.
"Olive," he said. "You cut off your toes."
She looked down at the bowl. "Are they still toes?" she asked. — Amelia Gray

We found that members of expeditions hailing from more hierarchical countries were more likely to die in the Himalayas. Why? Because in countries and cultures that are hierarchical, decision-making tends to be a top-down process. People from these countries are more likely to die on difficult mountain climbs because they are less likely to speak up and less likely to alert leaders to changing conditions and impending problems. — Adam D. Galinsky

I want you to start a brand-new section in your notebooks and call it Mr. Browne's Precepts." He kept talking as we did what he was telling us to do. "Put today's date at the top of the first page. And from now on, at the beginning of every month, I'm going to write a new Mr. Browne precept on the chalkboard and you're going to write it down in your notebook. Then we're going to discuss that precept and what it means. And at the end of the month, you're going to write an essay about it, about what it means to you. So by the end of the year, you'll all have your own list of precepts to take away with you. — R.J. Palacio

Her hand lay on my stomach, precisely six inches from the top of my straining dick. I knew this because exactly once every sixty seconds I looked away from the screen to make sure it hadn't ripped a hole through my pants. Then I'd start counting down again, because the counting was the only thing keeping me from rolling her over and shoving my cock so far up her cunt it hit the back of her throat. — Joanna Wylde

They always tell us it's getting to the top that's hard. Climbing's the easy part. Sliding down the other side, that's the hard part. — Susan Dunlap

What use for? asks my mother, jiggling the table with her hand. You put something else on top, everything fall down. — Amy Tan

Why are you all buttoned up like that?" Cameron ran his gaze down the blackberry-shaped buttons of her bodice.[ ... ] "You were happy to bare all last night," Cameron said. He let his mallet handler hover an inch from her chest. "Your bodice was down here."
Ainsley cleared her throat. "Low neckline for evening, high for morning."[ ... ]
"This doesn't suit you," Cameron said.
"I can't help the fashion, Lord Cameron."
Cameron poked the top button with his gloved finder. "Undo this."
Ainsley jumped. "What?"
"Unbutton your damned frock."
She nearly choked. "Why?"
"Because I want you to." Cameron's smile spread across his face, slow and sinful, and his voice went low. Dangerous. "Tell me, Mrs. Douglas. How many buttons will you undo for me? — Jennifer Ashley

Kemp-Roth was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate. — David Stockman

I first became aware of death when my father held me up to see the view from the top of the Empire State Building. I thought that if he moved me just one foot over, I would die. But I trusted him to hold me tight. I wouldn't fall over, and he would place me down safely. — Chrissi Sepe

And then the shower fell, sudden, profuse. No one had seen the cloud coming. There it was, black, swollen, on top of them. Down it poured like all the people in the world weeping. Tears. Tears. Tears. — Virginia Woolf

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree~
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. — Robert Frost

I had seen that once before, bleeding water. A little baby I worked on as a resident in training. That poor kid had been shot as well - his father had blasted away the top of his head with a shotgun - and we couldn't begin to stop the bloodletting in that case. "Looking pretty thin down here," I hollered when the stuff coming out his wounds was no more than pink salt water. That baby's heart stopped, started, stopped and started a dozen times before it finally gave up the ghost and we pronounced him. I could have read a newspaper through the watery stuff coming out his veins by then. — Edison McDaniels

Our steel-tipped step-ladder arrows will let us rescue that injured stork that settled down on top of the obelisk and can't fly away! — Robert Bernstein

I gasp, and his mouth swoops down. He's kissing me, violently. Briefly our teeth clash, then his tongue is in my mouth.
Desire explodes like the Fourth of July throughout my body, and I'm kissing him back, matching his fervor, my hands knotting in his hair, pulling it, hard. He groans, a low sexy sound in the back of his throat that reverberates through me, and his hand moves down my body to the top of my thigh, his fingers digging into my flesh through the plum dress.
I pour all the angst and heartbreak of the last few days into our kiss, binding him to me, and it hits me - in this moment of blinding passion - he's doing the same, he feels the same. — E.L. James

The revolution here is from hierarchical to lateral power. That's the power shift. So increasingly a younger generation that's grown up on the internet and now increasingly distributing renewable energies, they're measuring politics in terms of a struggle between centralized, hierarchical, top-down and closed and proprietary, versus distributed, open, collaborative, transparent. This shift, from hierarchical to lateral power, is going to change the way we live, the way we educate our children, and the way we govern the world. — Jeremy Rifkin

At the top of the page I wrote my full name [ ... ] At the sight of it, many thoughts rushed through me, but I could write down only this: "I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it." And then as I looked at this sentence a great deal of shame came over me and I wept and wept so much that the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to become one great big blur. — Jamaica Kincaid

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm. — Jennifer Egan

It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble - whether instituting open housing, civilian compliant review boards, or sex education programs - when they presume that a reform is an inevitable comcomitant of progress. It is then they are most likely to establish their reforms by top-down bureaucratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues. — Rick Perlstein

I God, a very Gomorry on wheels! You lead the most exciting life I know of, and complain more about it than any two well-off bastards in the running. I am glad to hear you sound like your old self, though I never hearn of no Jonathan with two Davids.
Top of this letter is an allusion to that wonderful novel, The SotWeed Factor, in which Ebenezer Cooke, "poet and virgin," is about to be raped by a buncher sailors (they have him tied across a table in the fo'c'sle; he is saved by a raiding party of pirates, one of whom strides into the scene and says, "I God, this here ship's a very floatin' Gomorry!"
Have come down with the flu since inditing the above. [ ... ]. The mail yestiddy brought a letter from Sam Beckett! asked to see Sappho and Arky. I sag with fatigue. Blessings.
Guy — Guy Davenport

To write it down was to put the finishing touch on any event, see what it was, what it meant, what it stood for. To put anything into words was like pouring melted wax on top of cold glasses of jelly, to harden there and preserve and keep what was underneath like new. — Ardyth Kennelly

Never look for the story in the 'lede.' Reporters are required to put what's happened up top, but the practiced pundit places a nugget of news, even a startling insight, halfway down the column, directed at the politiscenti. When pressed for time, the savvy reader starts there. — William Safire

He's on his knees.
I bite back the moan caught in my throat just before he lifts me up and carries me to the bed. He's on top of me in an instant, kissing me with a kind of intensity that makes me wonder why I haven't died or caught on fire or woken up from this dream yet. He's running his hands down my body only to bring them back up to my face and he kisses me once, twice, and his teeth catch my bottom lip for just a second and I'm clinging to him, wrapping my arms around his neck and running my hands through his hair and pulling him into me.
He tastes so sweet. So hot and so sweet and I keep trying to say his name but I can't even find the time to breathe, much less to say a single word. — Tahereh Mafi

Don't order any of the faerie food," said Jace, looking at her over the top of his menu. "It tends to make humans a little crazy. One minute you're munching a faerie plum, the next minute you're running naked down Madison Avenue with antlers on your head. Not," he added hastily, "that this has ever happened to me. — Cassandra Clare

When you're writing a book, it's rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe up onto the top of a hill, and you see something else. Then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape really. The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it's got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you've done all ties up. But it's a very, very long, slow process. — Roald Dahl

steps, deep in thought. A breeze was slightly disturbing his hair. Then, as we watched, he walked very slowly up the steps. At the top, he turned and came back down, a little faster. Turning once more, my father became still again for several seconds, contemplating the steps before him. Eventually, he climbed them a second time, very deliberately. This time he continued on across the grass until he had almost reached the summerhouse, then turned and came walking slowly back, his eyes never leaving the ground. In fact, I can describe his manner at that moment no better than the way Miss Kenton puts it in her letter; it was indeed 'as though he hoped to find some precious jewel he had dropped there'. — Kazuo Ishiguro

NATURAL FLEA PROTECTION FOR DOGS An easy way to protect your dog from fleas is to apply a drop or two of eucalyptus essential oil on top of her head and ears, down her spine, and on her tail. Aromatic — Editors Of Storey Publishing's Country Wisdom Bulletins

A mother's body against a child's body makes a place. It says you are here. Without this body against your body there is no place. I envy people who miss their mother. Or miss a place or know something called home. The absence of a body against my body created a gap, a hole, a hunger. This hunger determined my life ... The absence of a body against my body made attachment abstract. Made my own body dislocated and unable to rest or settle. A body pressed against your body is the beginning of nest. I grew up not in a home but in a kind of free fall of anger and violence that led to a life of constant movement, of leaving and falling. It is why at one point I couldn't stop drinking and fucking. Why I needed people to touch me all the time. It had less to do with sex than location. When you press against me, or put yourself inside me. When you hold me down or lift me up, when you lie on top of me and I can feel your weight, I exist. I am here. — Eve Ensler

As communicators and marketers, people are so accustomed to thinking from the 'top down.' Finding the great analyst or the famous journalist who will endorse what you do and tell the rest of the world to go and buy your product. — Guy Kawasaki

I got stuck up a tree when I was about seven, and my dad had to come and get the ladder to get me down. I loved to climb all the way up to the top. I must have been a koala in my past life. — Miranda Kerr

I think we did a pretty good role, linking, being a sounding board really and a driving force, especially from the bottom up. I think that part of this is bottom up as well as top down. — Richard Rogers