Flail Quotes

Time with his old flail Beat me full sore; Till: Hold, I cried, I'll stand no more. Then I heard a wail And looking spied How love's little bow Had laid time low. ~ John Dewey

We stepped back and looked at the king of the gods, slumped in his chair snoring, and cradling his crook like a teddy bear. I placed the war flail across his lap, hoping it might make a difference - maybe complete his powers or something. No such luck.
"Sick weasels," Ra muttered.
"Behold," Sadie said bitterly. "the glorious Ra. ~ Rick Riordan

The Screelings are loose and the Keeper may win.
His assassins have come to rip off your skin.
Golden eyes will see you if you try to run.
The screelings will get you and laugh like it's fun.

Walk away slow or they'll tear you apart,
and laugh all day long as they rip out your heart.
Golden eyes will see you if you try to stand still.
The screelings will get you, for the Keeper they kill.

Hack 'em up, chop 'em up, cut 'em to bits,
or else they will get you while laughing in fits.
If the screelings don't get you the Keeper will try,
to reach out and touch you, your skin he will fry.

Your mind he will flail, your soul he will take.
You'll sleep with the dead, for life you'll forsake.
You'll die with the Keeper till the end of time.
He hates that you live, your life is the crime.

The screelings might get you, it says so in text.
If screelings don't get you the Keeper is next,
lest he who's born true can fight for life's bond.
And that one is marked; he's the pebble in the pond. ~ Terry Goodkind

What? she asked, like she was surprised, even though she was fully aware that she was both distracting herself and distancing herself by becoming Therapist Sadie, rather than being Sadie the bag of flail who was marinating in her own lustypants. ~ Maisey Yates

I have walked by stalls in the market-place where books, dog-eared and faded from their purple, have burst with a white hosanna. I have seen people crowned with a double crown, holding in either hand the crook and flail, the power and the glory. I have understood how the scar be­comes a star, I have felt the flake of fire fall, miraculous and pentecostal. My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are grey faces that peer over my shoulder. ~ William Golding

People often compare
depression to drowning.

That is not even close.

Consider sitting in a dark room
scared and confused -
Choking on something you
know nothing about,
For reasons you cannot comprehend.

That is depression.

When you are drowning,
you can still flail your arms,
call for help, and try your best
to keep afloat.

In depression, you do nothing.
Absolutely nothing. ~ Akif Kichloo

The first thing I did was run. Okay, actually the first thing I did was scream, lose my balance, flail my arms in the air like some kind of uncoordinated bird, then slide down the side of the tree and land on my butt.
Then I ran. ~ Gemma Halliday

While they flail about, you will remain calm in the knowledge that you possess strength from within. ~ Henry Rollins

Don't flail against the world, use it. Flexibility is the operative principle in the art of war. ~ Sun Tzu

You know how if a drowning person can't swim, the best thing they can do is stop trying to swim, and just float? But instead they panic and flail, and the more they flail the worse it gets, and the worse it gets the more they flail? ~ Misa Sugiura

Lord, we flail. Forgive the lies we tell from purple thrones on TBN. Forgive the lies we tell in shrines. Forgive every attempt at self-redemption, the holy efforts we call our own, all the clawing we call resurrection. Bury us. Take us to helpless dust. Then roll away the stone and call us by our names. Make us all Lazarus. (125) ~ N.D. Wilson

He reached for me, and fast as lightning, he boxed my ears. All I remember is the world exploding. Cassandra says she helped me back to our room, and there was blood coming from my left ear. My right ear mended in a day or two, but I could only hear a little out of the left one, and there was a beating pain deep down. Soon I took ill with fever. Mama said that had nothing to do with the ear, but I think it did."
Pandora paused, unwilling to relate any of the distasteful details of her ear suppurating and draining. She glanced cautiously at Gabriel, whose face was averted. He was no longer playing with her braid. His hand had clenched around it until the muscles of his forearms and wrist stood out.
"Even after I recovered from the fever," Pandora said, "the hearing didn't come back all the way. But the worst part was that I kept losing my balance, especially at night. It made me afraid of the dark. Ever since then-" She stopped as Gabriel lifted his head.
His face was hard and murderous, the hellfrost in his eyes frightening her more than her father's fury ever had.
"That bloody son of a bitch," he said softly. "If he were still alive, I'd beat him with a thresher's flail."
Pandora reached out with a fluttering motion, patting the air near him. "No," she said breathlessly, "no, I wouldn't want that. I hated him for a long time, but now I feel sorry for him."
Gabriel caught her hand in midair, swift but gentle, as if it were a bird he wanted to hol ~ Lisa Kleypas

9 Something else you need to realize about the book
9.1. Is that
The sheer number of pages in the book is such that ordinary human fingers cannot turn the pages in a reliably repeatable fashion. Simply breathing in the same room as the book will cause the book's pages to flail about wildly. Even the Brownian motion of particles has been known to move several hundred pages at a time.
9.2 If you ever lose your place in the book
it is unlikely that you will ever be able to return to the same page again in your lifetime. ~ Charles Yu

If anything is terrifying, if there is a reality that surpasses dream, it is this:
to live, to see the sun, to be in full possession of manly vigor, to be full of health and joy, to laugh valiantly, to run toward the glory in front of you, dazzling, to feel in your chest lungs that breathe, a heart that beats, a will that reasons, to speak, to think, to love, to have a mother, to have a wife, to have children, to have the light, and all of a sudden, in the time it takes to let out a cry, in less than one minute flat, to tumble into an abyss, to fall, to roll, to crush, to be crushed, to see the blades of wheat, flowers, leaves, branches, and yet not to be able to stop yourself by grabbing any of them, to feel your saber useless, men underneath you, horses on top of you, to flail about in vain, your bones broken by some kick in the dark, to feel a heel making your eyes pop out of your head, to bite into horseshoes with rage, to suffocate, to howl, to twist yourself in knots, to be at the bottom of all this and tell yourself: Just now I was one of the living! ~ Victor Huge

He says it harshly, savagely, but he does not say the word. Like a little boy in the dark to flail his courage and suddenly aghast into silence by his own noise. ~ William Faulkner

All that pent up longing," he says, "all that desire to flail and flap around. Them wings have needs. ~ Justin Torres

I played soccer, and I was the kid who ran the wrong way, or I was pretending to be some sort of zebra and I would flail my arms and kick up my legs. ~ Johnny Weir

If he was wood, he was a flail, and I was grain on the threshing floor.
I was a thousand grains, my thoughts blown like chaff. All that was left was the taste of salt. ~ Sarah Micklem

What do you know of gods and saints?" I ask, filling my voice with scorn.
His fingers drift to the silver oak leaf of Saint Camulos on his cloak. "I know that what our saints want is not always made clear to us. Sometimes, it is their wish for us to flail and struggle and come to our own choices, not accept ones that have been made for us. ~ Robin LaFevers

Science began with a gadget and a trick. The gadget was the wheel; the trick was fire. We have come a long way from the two-wheel cart to the round-the-world transport plane, or from the sparking flint to man-made nuclear fission. Yet I wonder whether the inhabitants of Hiroshima were more aware of the evolution of science than ancient man facing an on-storming battle chariot.
It isn't physics that will make this a better life, nor chemistry, nor sociology. Physics may be used to atom-bomb a nation and chemistry may be used to poison a city and sociology has been used to drive people and classes against classes. Science is only an instrument, no more than a stick or fire or water that can be used to lean on or light or refresh, and also can be used to flail or burn or drown. Knowledge without morals is a beast on the loose. ~ Dagobert D. Runes

His Greatness the King Pteppicymon XXVIII, Lord of the Heavens, Charioteer of the Wagon of the Sun, Steersman of the Barque of the Sun, Guardian of the Secret Knowledge, Lord of the Horizon, Keeper of the Way, the Flail of Mercy, the High Born One, the Never Dying King. ~ Terry Pratchett

MOS: And besides, sir, You are not like a thresher that doth stand With a huge flail, watching a heap of corn, And, hungry, dares not taste the smallest grain, But feeds on mallows, and such bitter herbs; Nor like the merchant, who hath fill'd his vaults With Romagnia, and rich Candian wines, Yet drinks the lees of Lombard's vinegar: You will not lie in straw, whilst moths and worms Feed on your sumptuous hangings and soft beds; You know the use of riches, and dare give now From that bright heap, to me, your poor observer, Or to your dwarf, or your hermaphrodite, Your eunuch, or what other household-trifle Your pleasure allows maintenance. ~ Ben Jonson

I miss the restraints. In a way, they allowed me the freedom to writhe and flail. They gave me something and someone to fight against. Without them ... I feel like a traitor. No longer a prisoner, I seem to be allowing them to keep me here. ~ C.J. Roberts

Autumn arrives like a warrior with the stain of blood upon his brazen mail. His crimson scarf is rent. His scarlet banner drips with gore. His step is like a flail upon the threshing floor. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Why do you not fight when there is still breath and blood within you? Why do you not trumpet and flail? ~ Brooke Bolander

I especially treasured my glimpses of Mother, Queen Cleopatra VII. She sat on a golden throne, looking as resplendent as one of the giant marble statues guarding the tombs of the Old Ones. Diamonds twinkled in a jungle of black braids on her ceremonial wig. She wore a diadem with three rearing snakes and a golden broad collar, shining with lapis lazuli, carnelian, and emeralds, over her golden, form-fitting pleated gown. In one hand, she held a golden ankh of life, while the other clasped the striped crook and flail of her divine rulership. Her stillness radiated power, like a lioness pausing before the pounce. It left me breathless with awe. ~ Vicky Alvear Shecter

The Lord uses his flail of tribulation to separate the chaff from the wheat. ~ John Bunyan

A well-read fool is the most pestilent of blockheads; his learning is a flail which he knows not how to handle, and with which he breaks his neighbor's shins as well as his own. Keep a fellow of this description at arm's length, as you value the integrity of your bones. ~ Stanislaw Leszczynski

So basically your plan is to flail about helplessly. ~ Harlan Coben

Ione

III.

TO-DAY my skies are bare and ashen,
And bend on me without a beam.
Since love is held the master-passion,
Its loss must be the pain supreme -
And grinning Fate has wrecked my dream.
But pardon, dear departed Guest,
I will not rant, I will not rail;
For good the grain must feel the flail;
There are whom love has never blessed.
I had and have a younger brother,
One whom I loved and love to-day
As never fond and doting mother
Adored the babe who found its way
From heavenly scenes into her day.
Oh, he was full of youth's new wine, -
A man on life's ascending slope,
Flushed with ambition, full of hope;
And every wish of his was mine.
A kingly youth; the way before him
Was thronged with victories to be won;
so joyous, too, the heavens o'er him
Were bright with an unchanging sun, -
His days with rhyme were overrun.
Toil had not taught him Nature's prose,
Tears had not dimmed his brilliant eyes,
And sorrow had not made him wise;
His life was in the budding rose.
I know not how I came to waken,
Some instinct pricked my soul to sight;
My heart by some vague thrill was shaken, -
A thrill so true and yet so slight,
I hardly deemed I read aright.
As when a sleeper, ign'rant why,
Not knowing what mysterious hand
Has called him out of slumberland,
Starts up to find some danger n ~ Paul Laurence Dunbar

I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

My soul will not sleep
For want of my sister
The river runs between us
And I am sick with loss.
My pool is broken
By ripples unending,
For the wind has blown her far away,
The wind has blown her far away.

Oh, sister, your perfume
Is like honey dropped in water.
Like spices and pomegranates,
You stain my mouth with longing.
My pool is broken
By ripples unending;
The wind has blown your odor far away,
The wind has blown your odor far away.

The gods have made your love
Like the advance of flames on straw,
My longing like the downward stoop
Of the falcon in bright flight.
My pool is broken
By ripples unending.
I will fly to you on wind far away,
I will fly to you on wind far away.

I am a hunted goose, a hunted one;
The beauty of your shining hair
Is a bait to trap me in your net;
Your eyes, a snare of meryu-wood.
Gratefully I fall
Into ripples unending.
Hunt me, sister, far away.
Hunt me, sister, far away. ~ L.M. Ironside

Though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves, because there is no difference in what they both suffer. For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

Usually with life, you start wherever you are, and you flail around for a while
~ Anne Lamott

I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar. ~ Stephen King

He is a curious avatar. Passion and pain, made manifest. The dreams he had are gone. All that is left is this unflinching need to prove the world false. Does he truly understand his own actions? Or does he merely flail about as marionettes do without skilled hands to guide them? ~ Grant Smuts

I looked around and we were about a mile-and-a-half from land, and I thought, 'OK, I'm going to drown now.' And then I started to flail out and panic. I gradually calmed down and I got home. But the reality was that in that moment I was panicking and I feel like that to me was the clue about Ripley, that Ripley constantly finds himself out of his depth in the film and then reacts very, very badly. ~ Anthony Minghella

Music's the best thing we do as humans, isn't it? Music, I mean you flail your limbs, make you move in a way you don't understand. Or it can make you weep like a sailor's wife staring at a storm. ~ Russell Howard

A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment - and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again. ~ Walter Pater

Blah!' Oglivy yells, pushing Emma and me into a pile of wet leaves. We roll around, a red flail of limbs and hysterical laughter. We are all raccoon-drunk on moonlight and bloodshed and the heady, under blossom smell of the forest. I breathe in the sharp odor of cold stars and skunk, thinking, 'This is the happiest I have ever been'. I wish somebody would murder a sheep every night of my life. It feels like we are all embarking on a nightmare together. 'And will stop it in progress!' I think, yanking Emma and Ogli to their feet and hurting towards the lake. We will make sure that the rest of the herd escapes Heimdall's fate, we will.... ~ Karen Russell

She grasped the crook and flail with cool hands and sank gracefully to her knees. The High Priest of Amun placed a piece of flatbread imprinted with an ankh, the symbol of everlasting life, upon her tongue. It was gritty, the dough having been sprinkled with sand blessed by all the High Priests before it was baked that morning. ~ Stephanie Thornton

Most often, couples who get together after months or years of online infatuation enact a twenty-first-century version of Icarus flying too close to the sun with his waxen wings: the real-life exposure quickly melts the fiber-optic cable that was holding the couple aloft, and they plummet into the sea, where they tend to flail about for a while, trying to rescue their former magic. ~ Daniel Jones

So what's your alternative? people say, as if that's logic. We don't have to have an alternative, that's not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you're welcome, but if we don't that no more invalidates our hate for this, for what is, than does that of a serf for her lord, her flail-backed insistence that this must end, whether or not she accompanies it with a blueprint for free wage labor. ~ China Mieville

The poets are a harmless little folk, with their dreams and raptures and heaven full of Greek gods that they carry about with them in their fantasy. But they become wicked as soon as they presume to hold their ideal up to reality and then flail the latter angrily, when they should have nothing at all to do with it. They would, nevertheless, remain harmless if they were only granted their free little place in reality un disturbed and not compelled through crowding and pressure to cast a backward glance at it, for it reaches beyond the clouds, and they themselves cannot survey it all and must cling to the stars as provisory border points, of which, however, who knows how many are yet today invisible, their light still in the process of journeying down to us. ~ Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann

Oh, come on. I want to see the big-spiky-ball thing."
"You do not need a flail." Kanin scowled, as though imagining what I could do with it. ~ Julie Kagawa

Frontal lobes includes suppressing impulses from the parietal lobes, which are curious and capricious and, as the lobes most intimately involved with touch, want to explore everything tactilely. So when certain parts of the frontal lobe go kaput, the brain can no longer tamp down these parietal impulses, and the hand begins to flail and grab. (Neurologically, this flaring up of suppressed impulses resembles the "release" of the snout reflex in kuru victims.) And because the grasping impulse springs from the subconscious, the conscious brain can't always interrupt it and break the hand's grip. Hand-to-hand combat - with ~ Sam Kean

How are you off for drink? We have got everything in the world on board here. Can you catch?' and almost immediately a large bottle of champagne was thrown from the gunboat to the shore. It fell in the waters of the Nile, but happily where a gracious Providence decreed them to be shallow and the bottom soft. I nipped into the water up to my knees, and reaching down seized the precious gift which we bore in triumph back to our mess.

This kind of war was full of fascinating thrills. It was not like the Great War. Nobody expected to be killed. Here and there in every regiment or battalion, half a dozen, a score, at the worst thirty or fourty, would pay forfeit; but to the great mass of those who took part in the little wars of Britain in those vanished and light-hearted days, this was only a sporting element in a splendid game. Most of us were fated to se a war where the hazards were reversed, where death was the general expectation and severe wounds were counted as lucky escapes, where whole brigades were shorn away under the steel flail of artillery and machine-guns, where the survivors of one tornado knew that they would certainly be consumed in the next or the next after that.

Everything depends upon the scale of events. We young men who lay down to sleep that night within three miles of 60,000 well-armed fanatical Dervishes, expecting every moment their violent onset or inrush and sure of fighting at latest with the dawn – we may perhaps be pardoned if ~ Winston S. Churchill

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches. ~ Tana French

Only now, years after having read though the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, Poe, Balzac did he realise that even the most prolific writer created only one novel; throw away the individual bindings and the whole of each man's writing constituted one book: the true and complete portrait of himself. An artist had one thing to say, and one only; he might flail about, seek new techniques, forms, colour combinations, subjects, but intrinsically he would always paint the same canvas, write the same book. ~ Irving Stone

And lock your hands to the table so they don't flail around or touch your hair. ~ Kate White

The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,
The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,
The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears
The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,
And hacks the coiling life out ... ~ Robert Lowell

For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked.
and thus it is that in the same affliction the wicked detest God and blaspheme, while the good pray and praise. So material a difference does it make, not what ills are suffered, but what kind of man suffers them. For stirred up with the same movement, mud exhales a horrible stench, and ointment emits a fragrant odor. (pg. 32, Book 1 argument #8) ~ Augustine Of Hippo

This is what it's like to drown: You take a last look at the sky, a last breath, slowly. Air goes into your lungs and then you are under water. You let the air out molecule by molecule, realizing for the first time how precious it is, this thing that feels so much like nothing, neither liquid nor solid. Your eyes are open wide. The world goes cool and green and you keep falling. There are shapes in the darkness, fronds of river weed waving, dark indescribable things that float and then sink with you. You never knew you were so heavy. The density of your flesh has never been of such prime importance. The air leaks out of you in spite of your mightiest attempts to hold it. You need more but there is none. Leafy things flail. The water's coolness is no longer soothing. You gasp. Water rushes into your lungs and floods them. Your eyes stare wider. You thrash. You want more than anything to live, to be able to rise again, but you keep falling. The river is bottomless. It pushes you along in the direction of its current like an impatient auntie, but it won't let you to the surface. Your eyes are wide open, but slowly everything goes black. You begin to float beneath the surface. You are conscious of the coolness again, of how green everything is. You move with the water and through it. You have left your body far behind. The river has become a part of you. ~ Larissa Lai

The bloody cockfucking wanker therapist wants me to write my bloody thoughts about all the tragedy in my bloody life. It'll be therapeutic, he says. It'll be closure, he cheers. I'd bloody well like to push him over the ledge of his window, I think back. Hang my head over the sill and tinkle my bloody fingers in a wave. Watch him flail his arms about trying to bloody fly as he plummets, then splashes across the sidewalk. ~ Christine Zolendz