Block Quotes - Page 20

Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.

I don't want any funny business, and above all I don't want to be dragged into other people's funny business. If it's to be my head on the block, I want to know that it's doing there, and not that it's some stupid things that other people have done.

The ongoing war in Afghanistan is being imposed on us, and Afghans are being sacrificed in it for someone else's interests. We are not blocking the interests of the United States or other major powers. But we are demanding that if you consider Afghanistan the place from which to advance your interests, then you should also pay attention to Afghanistan's interests.

Load up your mind with pictures capturing your preferred tomorrow. Put the remembrances of the past in a place where they won't block your view.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.

Writer's block is a myth. I never see the gardeners suffering from gardening block.

Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it.

I was born and raised in St. Louis, and this little town, eight blocks away, place no one ever heard of, a black man there commands the attention of the world for months? That ain't my world.

My father was the guy on the block who said hi to everyone.

I don't tend to listen to music in training, except maybe the radio in the gym. I do use music prior to racing though; it helps to fire me up plus it's good for blocking out the distractions around me.

To see the butcher slap the steak before he laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly. It was agreeable too - it really was - to see him cut it off so smooth and juicy. There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large and keen; it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch, clearness of tone, skilful handling of the subject, fine shading. It was the triumph of mind over matter; quite.

Turn your stumbling blocks into steppingstones to success.

Kids have what I call a built-in hypocrisy antenna that comes up and blocks out what you're saying when you're being a hypocrite.

I am a bohemian person. I don't speak German, and I live in a foreign country where all the signs are in German. I did that deliberately. I'm like a ghost. Look at how much media and advertising you're subjected to, this mindless chatter of advertising. I just block it out so effortlessly because it's all a foreign language to me. It's really a good thing for my head, living in Berlin.

You are saying, are you not, I said to Manuelito, that stories have more room in them than ideas? [...] He laughed. That is correct, Señor. It is as if ideas are made of blocks. Rigid and hard. And stories are made of a gauze that is elastic. You can almost see through it, so what is beyond is tantalizing. You can't quite make it out; and because the imagination is always moving forward, you yourself are constantly stretching. Stories are the way spirit is exercised.

As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks, I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour

One quality of entrepreneurship is just persistence, not giving up because you have road blocks and also not giving in because other people tell you that you're nuts. You are nuts and you should be proud of it. Stick with what you believe in.

Utopians...consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind's totalization may flounder.

Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can only be doubted by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or plain bigotry.

There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.

Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

Munroe stared at the sky. Cursed her weakness, her inability to block out what it would mean to knowingly deliver the innocent into the same hell that had birthed her to life. In this moment of decision she condemned to death the one she would risk anything to save. To the night, Munroe whispered good-bye. Opened the floodgates to Gehenna-that place of the wicked, that place of the dead-and here in this deserted spot, she buried her soul.

Psychologists usually offer three explanations for the failure of group brainstorming. The first is social loafing: in a group, some individuals tend to sit back and let others do the work. The second is production blocking: only one person can talk or produce an idea at once, while the other group members are forced to sit passively. And the third is evaluation apprehension, meaning the fear of looking stupid in front of one's peers.

The Hadley Street Dream is a tribute to making a vision come to life. My father built a compound on a dessert city block, he saw something in that space we couldn't see. It was years later the album was born right there on Hadley St. He built the studio I started recording the album at.