Trapdoor Quotes & Sayings

There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called 'popular culture' or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant. Some writers try to have this both ways, by making their columns both 'relevant' and 'contemporary' while still manifesting their self-evident superiority. Thus - I paraphrase only slightly - 'Even as we all obsess about Paris Hilton, the people of Darfur continue to die.' A pundit like (say) Bob Herbert would be utterly lost if he could not pull off such an apparently pleasing and brilliant 'irony. — Christopher Hitchens

Lake water, even when boiled, has an effect on my digestive system similar to the movement of a hangman's trapdoor. — Fennel Hudson

He started down the staircase, but stopped a few steps down. He turned to me and said, "I must tell you again, I don't want you to come down here. I don't want to see you get hurt."
"A trapdoor has been discovered. It begs to be explored. Not going down those stairs will be the biggest regret of my life. — August Westman

In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior ... — Thomas Harris

Jeb climbed the ladder Fang had just lowered and I indulged in a moments fantasy about someone slamming the trapdoor on his head.-max — James Patterson

Maybe there's a trapdoor under my chair, and I'll just disappear. — J.D. Salinger

There is funny ha-ha, and there is funny peculiar, and beneath a trapdoor in Kevin's mind is a place where the two blur together, the place of jokes, churning so furiously frequently, when it kicks up a line, he has no idea what it will turn out to be. — Kevin Brockmeier

A trapdoor had slammed open at the edge of the arena, followed by another and another. Slowly, reluctantly, animals were forced through the gaps. Lions, tigers, bears. "Oh my!" said the Doctor, as the trapdoors slammed shut again. — Jacqueline Rayner

He meant everything he said, when he said it.
But this is his default. And it won out.
Right now you're depressed about one thing.
Before you were depressed about everything.
These are good times for you."
"I'm afraid of loving again.
I'm afraid I've lost my faith."
"You haven't."
"The trapdoor I have in my mind?
That can go to those bad places?
It's almost gave way again."
"You know the ways to keep it nailed shut. — Emma Forrest

Audrey nodded warily. She had never cared for conspiratorial female conversation of this sort. Its assumption of shared preoccupations was usually unfounded in her experience, its intimacies almost always the trapdoor to some subterranean hostility. — Zoe Heller

Wishing, like sipping a glass of punch, or pulling aside a bearskin rug in order to access a hidden trapdoor in the floor, is merely a quiet way to spend one's time before the candles are extinguished on one's birthday cake. — Lemony Snicket

Once activated by redstone, a trapdoor will open wide! It can also be manually opened by right clicking it. 6 wood planks are needed! — Steve De Blanc

THROUGH THE TRAPDOOR I — J.K. Rowling

How to feel your way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of your skull. — Ray Bradbury

Is it dawn? She climbs the ladder and presses her ear to the trapdoor. No more sirens. Maybe the house burned — Anthony Doerr

Corrigan crept up to the bar, cautiously moving around it. It looked like he was copying all the moves he'd seen in old cop movies and westerns, and doing it rather badly. He lowered the pistol. There was no one behind the bar. There was however, an open trapdoor. And that would mean the bounty hunter was - .
"Don't move!" Came Beck's distant, slightly muffled, barked order. "My turn, I think! — Christina Engela

RULES OF LYING:
1. Figure out your lie before you open your mouth.
2. Play on your opponent's sympathies and weaknesses
3. Dance around the lie with distracting truth. They're far more convincing.
4. Picture the lie in your head as if it were the truth. They want to see how it's coming up.
5. Never forget which is the lie and which is the truth.
6. If you say something that brings you trouble, pretend that was actually the lie. Lie and say you were joking before, and aren't you funny? It's a quick escape from a sticky situation. It's the liars trapdoor.
7. Avoid it if at all possible.
8. Keep up your poker face. Never have a "tell" or a physical gesture that will give yourself away and let your opponent know your bluffing. — Kristin Walker

The trapdoor beneath our feet swings open. We find ourselves in bottomless free fall. We are lost in a great darkness, and there's no one to send out a search party. Given so harsh a reality, of course we're tempted to shut our eyes and pretend that we're safe and snug at home, that the fall is only a bad dream. — Carl Sagan

Far too often, people are woefully predictable. And I know many things. It's a curse. Here's something else I know: You are not doomed to be your parents. You can break the cycle. You can be whoever you want to be. But you will pay a price. You parents and everyone else will punish you if you choose to be you and not them. That's the price of your freedom. The cage is unlocked, but everyone is too scared to walk out because they whack you when you try, and they whack you hard. They want you to be scared, too. They want you to stay in the cage. But once you are a few steps beyond the trapdoor, they can't reach you anymore, so the whacking stops. That's another secret: They're too afraid to follow. They adore their own cages. — Matthew Quick

A ghastly creeping terror rises from a place beyond thoughts. Some innermost trapdoor she must leap upon immediately and lean against with all her weight and padlock shut. — Anthony Doerr

Was Hale. He glanced toward Node 3, wondering if the cryptographer were watching. "Fuck it," he grumbled. Below his feet the outline of a recessed trapdoor — Dan Brown

This would be ... a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power. — Chuck Palahniuk

Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary.
He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he drops through the trapdoor another puppet is in readiness to take his place. — Remy De Gourmont

What if they found a trapdoor out of this dead universe? A hole? A black hole? A place where the tyranny of time and space couldn't reach? — John C. Wright