Ball And Chain Quotes

One advantage to being a despised species is that you have freedom, freedom to be any crazy thing you want. If you listen to a group of housewives talk, you'll hear a lot of nonsense, some of it really crazy. This comes, I think, from being alone so much, and pursuing your own odd train of thought without impediment, which some call discipline. The result is craziness, but also brilliance. Ordinary women come out with the damnedest truth. You ignore them at your own risk. And they are permitted to go on making wild statements without being put in one kind of jail or another (some of them, anyway) because everyone knows they're crazy and powerless too. If a woman is religious or earthy, passive or wildly assertive, loving or hating, she doesn't get much more flak than if she isn't: her choices lie between being castigated as a ball and chain or as a whore. ~ Marilyn French

Everyone's here except for St. Clair." Meredith cranes her neck around the cafeteria. "He's usually running late."
"Always," Josh corrects. "Always running late."
I clear my throat. "I think I met him last night. In the hallway."
"Good hair and an English accent?" Meredith asks.
"Um.Yeah.I guess." I try to keep my voice casual.
Josh smirks. "Everyone's in luuurve with St. Clair."
"Oh,shut up," Meredith says.
"I'm not." Rashmi looks at me for the first time, calculating whether or not I might fall in love with her own boyfriend.
He lets go of her hand and gives an exaggerated sigh. "Well,I am. I'm asking him to prom. This is our year, I just know it."
"This school has a prom?" I ask.
"God no," Rashmi says. "Yeah,Josh. You and St. Clair would look really cute in matching tuxes."
"Tails." The English accent makes Meredith and me jump in our seats. Hallway boy. Beautiful boy. His hair is damp from the rain. "I insist the tuxes have tails, or I'm giving your corsage to Steve Carver instead."
"St. Clair!" Josh springs from his seat, and they give each other the classic two-thumps-on-the-back guy hug.
"No kiss? I'm crushed,mate."
"Thought it might miff the ol' ball and chain. She doesn't know about us yet."
"Whatever," Rashi says,but she's smiling now. It's a good look for her. She should utilize the corners of her mouth more often.
Beautiful Hallway Boy (Am I supposed to call him Etienne or St. Clair?) ~ Stephanie Perkins

You have got me walking up and down all day under those trees, saying to me over and over again, "Solitude, solitude." And You have turned around and thrown the world in my lap. You have told me, "Leave all things and follow me," and then You have tied half of New York to my foot like a ball and chain. You have got me kneeling behind that pillar with my mind making a noise like a bank. Is that contemplation? ~ Thomas Merton

Life isn't fair. It doesn't make sense. This unfairness is felt by everyone, from the Las Vegas tunnel dweller all the way to the executive in the high-rise. To some, these "unfair" experiences become a chastening ball and chain attached for the remainder of life. ~ John-Talmage Mathis

Everyone thinks that religion is the ball and chain. But the reality is that sin is the ball and chain. A relationship with Christ is the freedom that people are looking for in alcohol and drugs. ~ Dan Brown

I thought that he was righteous, but he's vain. Oh, somethings a telling me I wear the ball and chain. ~ Bob Dylan

So there existed fathers who dealt in the present, who didn't drag ancient history around like a ball and chain. So there were men who were not neck-deep and sinking in the quagmire of the past. ~ Zadie Smith

I clung tighter and tighter to my mother. I became a ball and chain around her neck. I could sense her reluctance, fell her urge to pull away from me. I didn't care. I clung harder and tighter than ever. One horrible afternoon, while I was watching my mother smiling at me from her NordicTrack, our separateness hit me like a bolt of lightning. I doubled over with anxiety and tried not to think about puking. ~ Terry Spencer Hesser

I once hit Quentin on the head with my ball and chain. ~ Chiaki Kuriyama

There's a fine line between pleasure and pain. Love me like a ball and chain. ~ Brian Setzer

For three years, the 'Meistersinger' score was a ball and chain to me. It went with me to every city and concert hall. ~ Bryn Terfel

A standing prick hath no conscience. And if that standing prick is attached to Bruce Robertson then it hath less than no conscience. You can't afford a conscience in this life, that has become a luxury for the rich and a social ball and chain for the rest of us. Even if I wanted one, which I certainly do not, I wouldn't have the faintest idea as how to go about getting one. ~ Irvine Welsh

The story is nothing like what you first thought it would be. But so what? It's better - richer, deeper, truer - than the original idea. The idea did its work: it got you thinking. After that, if you feel bound to stick to it no matter what, that idea becomes a ball and chain that you drag with you through the whole process. ~ Orson Scott Card

I'll never buy a cell phone, I'd rather die than have a cell phones. Cell phones are the 21st century's ball and chain. ~ Rebecca McNutt

That old ball and chain had me chained up for weeks,
So of course I'm off the chain as soon as I hit the streets. ~ Consequence

I could chill the room with reasons why I would give forgiveness - to the people who had selfishly left me a wounded soul. I kept dragging 'round those memories, like a ball and chain behind me - wondering why my troubles followed me wherever I would go....."

… lyric from the song, "No More Looking Over My Shoulder ~ Travis Tritt

Some men call her cyanide
For she'll cause and take your pain.
To others she's the devil
Or the quest for true love's bane,
And, to those less lucky,
She's called their ball and chain. ~ Phar West Nagle

I treat my writing life like a fabulous, enchanting lover, because that is what it is to me. Something that is terribly time consuming, delicious and time-stopping. I have missed important meetings for love, and I will continue to put my writing life in the same position. My writing life is the lover at the center, not the neglected cranky demanding millstone, my ball and chain.
When you are love, truly and passionately, you don't have to write down in your daily schedule "Spend quality time with Lover today. You can't not. ~ Heather Sellers

I blushed when he stepped behind me, encircling my waist with his arms.
His lips brushed against my ear. I believe the answer that will not get me in trouble with you is: the happiest day of my life. Or something along those lines. Definitely not the end of my carefree days or when I get a ball and chain. Hmmm, I'm just realizing that I'm going to have to buy you birthday and anniversary presents at the same time. What a pain. ~ Andrea Cremer

Next time there's a ball, ask me before someone else does, and not as a last resort! ~ J.K. Rowling

As Miriam released my hand I felt that she and Midwife Bell had returned to a more primitive world, where men never intruded and even their role in conception was unknown. Here the chain of life was mother to daughter, daughter to mother. Fathers and sons belonged in the shadows with the dogs and livestock, like the retriever growling at Midwife Bell's unfamiliar car from the window of my neighbours' living room. ~ J.G. Ballard

When he pursed his lips and dropped a hand into his coat pocket, the last thing Nur expected him to pull out was a cricket ball. "I'd hoped for a disruptor at least," she muttered reprovingly.

The Doctor slipped three fingers around the ball and hefted it experimentally. "I thought we'd try something a little less excessive."

He breathed gently on to the maroon leather and polished it on his leg as the Sontaran finally tossed the Kshatriya aside and stopped to pick up its fallen weapon. He stepped around the corner, sighting along his free arm as the Sontaran straightened, its back fully turned. The cricket ball flashed down the length of the corridor in the blink of an eye, punching into the back of the Sontaran's collar and ricocheting away. To Nur's astonishment, the alien spasmed and crashed to the floor like a falling tree. "Out for a duck," the Doctor commented, blowing across his fingertips.

"I've never seen anything killed by a cricket ball before."

"You haven't yet. He'll wake up in a few minutes. ~ David A. McIntee

You just don't want to get pigeon-holed into one position. That's why even though I start out at center, I may play small forward, if I get a rebound and you're not there I can bring the ball up. ~ Lisa Leslie

So," he said, flicking her nose, "how long have you wanted - "

"I don't see how that's any of your business, Captain Westfall. And I won't tell you until you tell me."

He flicked her nose again, and she batted away his fingers. He caught her hand in his, holding it up so he could look at her amethyst ring - the ring she never took off, not even to bathe. "The Yulemas ball. Maybe earlier. Maybe even Samhuinn, when I brought you this ring. But Yulemas was the first time I realized I didn't like the idea of you with - with someone else." He kissed the tips of her fingers. "Your turn."

"I'm not telling you," she said. Because she had no idea; she was still figuring out when it had happened, exactly. It somehow felt as if it had always been Chaol, even from the very beginning, even before they'd ever met. He began to protest, but she pulled him back down on top of her. "And that's enough talking. I might be tired, but there are still plenty of things to do instead of going for a run. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Fame is a funny thing. I like doing normal things. I like going to fairs. I like going to ball games. I like going to Disney World or a big field on the Fourth of July and having picnics with friends. The problem is you're either worried you're going to be recognized, or you're thankful you're not. It's always there. ~ Chris Evans

There's more tension in golf than in boxing because golfers bring it on themselves. It's silly really because it's not as if the golf ball is going to jump up and belt you on the whiskers, is it? ~ Henry Cooper

Can you drive it?"

"No. I can't drive a stick at all. It's why I took Andy's car and not one of yours."

"Oh people, for goodness' sake...move over." Choo Co La Tah pushed past Jess to take the driver's seat.

Curious about that, she slid over to make room for the ancient.

Jess hesitated. "Do you know what you're doing?"

Choo Co La Tah gave him a withering glare. "Not at all. But I figured smoeone needed to learn and no on else was volunteering. Step in and get situated. Time is of the essence."

Abigail's heart pounded. "I hope he's joking about that." If not, it would be a very short trip. Ren changed into his crow form before he took flight. Jess and Sasha climbed in, then moved to the compartment behind the seat. A pall hung over all of them while Choo Co La Tah adjusted the seat and mirrors.

By all means, please take your time. Not like they were all about to die or anything...

She couldn't speak as she watched their enemies rapidly closing the distance between them. This was by far the scariest thing she'd seen. Unlike the wasps and scorpions, this horde could think and adapt.
They even had opposable thumbs.

Whole different ball game.

Choo Co La Tah shifted into gear. Or at least he tried. The truck made a fierce grinding sound that caused jess to screw his face up as it lurched violently and shook like a dog coming in from the rain.

"You ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

You still waste time with those things, Lenu? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you'll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Do you want to see the string of pearls that Stefano gave me? ~ Elena Ferrante

Nor would I even begin to try to describe what she looks like as she's telling the story, reliving it, she's naked, hair spilling all down her back, sitting meditatively cross-legged amid the wrecked bedding and smoking ultralight Merits from which she keeps removing the filters because she claims they're full of additives and unsafe - unsafe as she's sitting there chain-smoking, which was so patently irrational that I couldn't even bring - yes and some kind of blister on her Achilles tendon, from the sandals, leaning with her upper body to follow the oscillation of the fan so she's moving in and out of a wash of moon from the window whose angle of incidence itself alters as the moon moves up and across the window - all I can tell you is she was lovely. The bottoms of her feet dirty, almost black. The moon so full it looks engorged. ~ David Foster Wallace

The quarterback is the leader of the team and the quarterback is the one that has the ball in his hands every single play. ~ Andy Dalton

As Aristotle put it, the beginning of philosophy is wonder. I am simply amazed to find myself living on a ball of rock that swings around an immense spherical fire. I am more amazed that I am a maze - a complex wiggliness, an arabesque of tubes, filaments, cells, fibers, and films that are various kinds of palpitation in this stream of liquid energy. ~ Alan W. Watts

Butters," rumbled Skaldi Hair Ball. If he really had broken fingers, it didn't look like they were bothering him much. "When are you going to get in this ring and train like a man?"
"About five minutes after I get a functional lightsaber," Butters replied easily, much to Hair Ball's amusement. ~ Jim Butcher

Can you imagine? That you can say something, offhand, and it can matter, it can really matter to someone else? Can you imagine what it's like to hear something like that? To hear someone say something and feel the world ripple around you? ~ Jesse Ball

Now,' cried the fiend, 'follow me! You must understand that I cannot get out by the great gate - the porter will not suffer that. Once here, there is no retreat. Follow me, therefore: we will just go to your house, where you shall dress yourself; for you can hardly go to a ball in your present costume - especially as it is not a bal masque. Mind and wrap yourself well up in your winding-sheet, for the nights are cold, and you may feel unpleasantly touched by it.'

As he said this, Satan laughed malignantly; and I continued silently to walk after him.

'I am sure,' continued he, 'that, in spite of the service I am doing you, you do not yet like me. You are always thus, you men - ungrateful to your friends. Not that I blame ingratitude; it is a vice upon which I pride myself, since I invented it myself; and I must say, that it is one most in vogue. But I do wish to see you a little more merry - it is the only thing I ask of you.'

I answered not, but still followed my guide, white as a statue, and as cold. I was silent; but, at the pauses in the fiend's voice, I could hear my teeth chatter against each other, and my bones rattle in my body. ("The Dead Man's Story") ~ James Hain Friswell

It has often been noted that three major revolutions in thought have threatened the idea of human centrality. First, Copernicus demonstrated that Earth was not the center about which all celestial bodies revolved. Next, Darwin showed us that we were not central in the chain of life but, like all other creatures, had evolved from other life-forms. Third, Freud demonstrated that we are not masters in our own house-that much of our behavior is governed by forced outside of our consciousness. There is no doubt that Freud's unacknowledged co-revolutionary was Arthur Schopenhauer, who, long before Freud's birth, had posited that we are governed by deep biological forced and then delude ourselves into thinking that we consciously choose our activities. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

If we seriously contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported, but for the most part our minds gloss such things over & until the ice finally lets us through we skate about merrily enough. Most people, I'm convinced, don't think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they're carried out feet first. ~ Philip Larkin

Our contemporaries are constantly wracked by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these contrary instincts, they seek to satisfy both at once. They imagine a single, omnipotent, tutelary power, but one that is elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with popular sovereignty. This gives them some respite. They console themselves for being treated as wards by imagining that they have chosen their own protectors. Each individual allows himself to be clapped in chains because that the other end of the chain is held not by a man or a class but by the people themselves. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The problem with chemistry is that it tends to blow things up. And she is already a chain of reactions building up inside. ~ Lauren Beukes

Surely there can be but one rule of right, if morality has an eternal foundation, and whoever sacrifices virtue, strictly so called, to present convenience, or whose DUTY it is to act in such a manner, lives only for the passing day, and cannot be an accountable creature. The poet then should have dropped his sneer when he says, "If weak women go astray, The stars are more in fault than they." For that they are bound by the adamantine chain of destiny is most certain, if it be proved that they are never to exercise their own reason, never to be independent, never to rise above opinion, or to feel the dignity of a rational will that only bows to God, and often forgets that the universe contains any being but itself, and the model of perfection to which its ardent gaze is turned, to adore attributes that, softened into virtues, may be imitated in kind, though the degree overwhelms the enraptured mind. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Sherlock Holmes closed his eyes and placed his elbows upon the arms of his chair, with his finger-tips together. "The ideal reasoner," he remarked, "would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. We have not yet grasped the results which the reason alone can attain to. Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to utilise all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment. It is not so impossible, however, that a man should possess all knowledge which is likely to be useful to him in his work, and this I have endeavoured in my case to do. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?"
"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. ~ Charles Dickens

We all know what feminists are. They are shrill, overly aggressive, man-hating, ball-busting, selfish, hairy, extremist, deliberately unattractive women with absolutely no sense of humor who see sexism at every turn. They make men's testicles shrivel up to the size of peas, they detest the family and think all children should be deported or drowned. ~ Susan J. Douglas

The FRG … was the closest thing any of them had to family, this simulacrum of friendship, women suddenly thrown together in a time of duress, with no one to depend on but each other, all of them bereft and left behind in this dry expanse of central Texas, walled in by strip malls, chain restaurants, and highways that led to better places. Most of them had gotten used to making life for themselves without a husband, finding doctors and dentists and playgrounds, filling their cell phones with numbers and their calendars with playdates, and then the husbands would return and the Army would toss them all at some other base in the middle of nowhere to begin again. ~ Siobhan Fallon

You have to just forget about the ball and swing the club. It's hard to see if you don't hit the green. ~ Stewart Cink

After six months in the academy, trainees learn to: Respect the chain of command and their place on the bottom of that chain. Sprinkle "sir" and "ma'am" into casual conversation. Salute. Follow orders. March in formation. Stay out of trouble. Stay awake. Be on time. Shine shoes. ~ Peter Moskos

Motherhood is a choice you make everyday, to put someone else's happiness and well-being ahead of your own, to teach the hard lessons, to do the right thing even when you're not sure what the right thing is ... and to forgive yourself, over and over again, for doing everything wrong. ~ Donna Ball

I'm like a point guard. Barack is about ideas and questions, and I don't have all the answers. He trusts me to pass the ball to others to give him points of view. ~ Mark Lippert

Just as important as knowing what gift God has given you is knowing which gifts He hasn't give you. Many Christians try for years to function with gifts they never had in the first place, and this doesn't do the Lord's work much good. It's like trying to hear something with your knee or throw a ball with your nose. Knees and noses are better off doing other things. ~ C. Wagner

Three things are required of you: the wishes you made when you first knew the breadth of this life; the contract you signed when you decided your wishes were not true or possible; and the exacting of the punishment you agreed to when you knew you would break the contract of your life. ~ Jesse Ball

stepped into the witness box to be examined. The defense wanted jurors who empathized with Muybridge - a married man who had a runaway wife, on the one hand, and a man who confronted a sexual rival, on the other. ~ Edward Ball

What's your name?" he asked above the roar of the music.
She leaned close. "My name is Wind," she whispered. "And Rain. And Bone and Dust. My name is a snippet of a half-remembered song."
He chuckled a low, delightful sound. She was drunk and silly, and so full of the glory of being young and alive and in the capital of the world that she could hardly contain herself.
"I have no name," she purred. "I am whoever the keepers of my fate tell me to be."
He grasped her by her wrist, running a thumb along the sensitive sknin underneath. "Then let me call you Mine for a dance or two. ~ Sarah J. Maas