Parlor Trick Quotes

For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick. That's the miserable truth. ~ Jonathan Nolan

But for as long as I've done this, there are still times I'm blown away when souls drop in for a visit. I'll never forget when, during a group reading, I saw a man sitting at the end of the dining room table. He wanted me to tell the host that he knew she was concerned about her best friend's husband. Then he looked at me and said, "I'm going to be with my father now." I told this story to the group in real time, and the host, overwhelmed with emotion, excused herself and left the room upset. When she came back, she said that just forty minutes before the session began, her best friend called to say that her husband died and his last words in private were, "I'm going to be with my father now." Are you kidding me with this? If that's a parlor trick, I'm one hell of a magician. ~ Theresa Caputo

Zara." He sighs. The wind bellows outside. "How can I make you understand this? I need your mom. If I don't get her, more boys will die."
"That's ridiculous."
"No, it's just how it is."
I think for a second. "If that's true, then why did Ian try to turn me?"
He loses his composure. His face shifts into something worried, something almost human. "Did he kiss you?"
"Almost. Betty killed him first."
He almost smiles. He pulls his hand through his hair. "Betty is fierce."
"Is that why you stay away when she's here?"
"Not even a pixie wants to tangle with a tiger."
He blows on the ember in his hand. It turns to dust.
"You seem like you could handle almost anything," I say.
"This?" He smirks. "Parlor tricks. ~ Carrie Jones

It is no parlor trick: There is a skull and, in the dark, it is glowing. Somehow it is now floating above us all. Listen: The skull is speaking. It is saying your name. It knows about you and your favorite flower and all about your tenth birthday. But it does not matter. You are not convinced. For some reason, you are still full of doubt. You stare into the dark, looking for wires. Grasping for strings, you hold your hands out. ~ Joe Meno

You know the parlor trick.
wrap your arms around your own body
and from the back it looks like
someone is embracing you
her hands grasping your shirt
her fingernails teasing your neck
from the front it is another story
you never looked so alone
your crossed elbows and screwy grin
you could be waiting for a tailor
to fit you with a straight jacket
one that would hold you really tight. ~ Billy Collins

Your existance hinders on no one but yourself. Only you can write your destiny. Fate is a mere parlor trick designed to coax you into believing otherwise. There is always a choice. ~ Chani Lynn Feener

And a man accepting a kiss as 'punishment' has to be the most overplayed parlor trick since the time of the First Emperor. Next to accepting a drink as punishment. Oh, the torture of it!"

"I didn't say I wouldn't enjoy it. This is merely a chance for you to know what it is to have a kiss you were in complete control of."

"It's hardly the same. You're still allowing me this liberty, as if it were a gift you were bestowing."

"Miss Yue-ying," he sighed. "Show some mercy. ~ Jeannie Lin

The trick to writer's block is to sack up and write through it, you see. ~ Jeph Jacques

The trick to staying out of trouble is to keep your nose out of other people's business. ~ Patricia Briggs

You may find that you have been telling yourself that practicing optimism is a risk, as though, somehow, a positive attitude will invite disaster and so if you practice optimism it may increase your feelings of vulnerability. The trick is to increase your tolerance for vulnerable feelings, rather than avoid them altogether.
[ ... ]
Optimism does not mean continual happiness, glazed eyes and a fixed grin. When I talk about the desirability of optimism I do not mean that we should delude ourselves about reality. But practicing optimism does mean focusing more on the positive fall-out of an event than on the negative. ... I am not advocating the kind of optimism that means you blow all your savings on a horse running at a hundred to one; I am talking about being optimistic enough to sow some seeds in the hope that some of them will germinate and grow into flowers. ~ Philippa Perry

The trick is not to be isolated―if you're isolated, like Winston Smith in 1984, then sooner or later you're going to break, as he finally broke. That was the point of Orwell's story. In fact, the whole tradition of popular control has been exactly that: to keep people isolated, because if you can keep them isolated enough, you can get them to believe anything. But when people get together, all sorts of things are possible. ~ Noam Chomsky

I love the trick of painting. You can have the movement within the still thing, but it is completely fixed. And that illusion is constantly exciting. ~ Cecily Brown

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

Empathising with the younger children on whom the same confidence trick was being imposed, I embarked on a crusade around the neighbourhood, telling all the kids that there was no Santa Claus. This reached the ears of the father of a neighbouring family, who reproved me for spoiling it for the little ones. Spoiling it! I could not understand what he meant. To my mind, they were being made fools of, and I was only saving them from this indignity. ~ Barbara Smoker

My sister taught me the best trick. When the salesclerk isn't looking, you make Sharpie marks on the front of all the others so no one else will buy them. I mean, how embarrassing would it be to have someone else show up at the dance wearing the same dress! This way, I know I'll be the only one."
"God,I wouldn't have the guts.What if you got caught!"
The Sharpie-wielding Phillite shrugged. "I would put them all on my dad's card. But then I wouldn't be able to buy the Manolos ... "
She and her impressed friends headed down the hall.Frankie banged his locker closed with unnecessary force. "Mind-boggling," he muttered. "All that money, and they can't buy a clue. ~ Melissa Jensen

So, regarding that tidbit about your having a fertile imagination when it comes to private activities," she said, fighting off anxiety. "Was it another lie?"
"Depends on how you look at it. It's not exactly a lie, and if you come with me to the Weird, you'll find that rumors of my 'creativity' when it comes to bed games with the opposite sex do exist. I started them myself and managed them very carefully. The trick with rumors is to feed them once in a while, so they don't die. ~ Ilona Andrews

Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues ... And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman ... ~ Italo Calvino

And at this very moment, like a miracle, the rail-bus appeared. We waved our arms frantically, hardly daring to hope that it would stop. It did stop. We scrambled thankfully on board.
That is the irony of travel. You spend your boyhood dreaming of a magic, impossibly distant day when you will cross the Equator, when your eyes will behold Quito. And then, in the slow prosaic process of life, that day undramatically dawns - and finds you sleepy, hungry and dull. The Equator is just another valley; you aren't sure which and you don't much care. Quito is just another railroad station, with fuss about baggage and taxis and tips. And the only comforting reality, amidst all this picturesque noisy strangeness, is to find a clean pension run by Czech refugees and sit down in a cozy Central European parlor to a lunch of well-cooked Wiener Schnitzel. ~ Christopher Isherwood

I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time. ~ George Saunders

Everybody screws up, ... Remember that. The trick is to realize it and start fixing the screwup. ~ Jon Jackson

Yes, the world was very strange. But you had to walk through. That was the trick. You had to keep walking through, always, with your chin held high, the way she had passed through the tunnels of the underworld, with only the dim light of the lumpen to guide her. That was the other trick, the other truth: Light would come to you from unexpected places. ~ Lauren Oliver

Cribbage!" I declared, pulling out the board, a deck of cards, and pen and paper, "Ben and I are going to teach you. Then we can all play."
"What makes you think I don't know how to play cribbage?" Sage asked.
"You do?" Ben sounded surprised.
"I happen to be an excellent cribbage player," Sage said.
"Really…because I'm what one might call a cribbage master," Ben said.
"I bet I've been playing longer than you," Sage said, and I cast my eyes his way. Was he trying to tell u something?
"I highly doubt that," Ben said, "but I believe we'll see the proof when I double-skunk you."
"Clearly you're both forgetting it's a three-person game, and I'm ready to destroy you both," I said.
"Deal 'em," Ben said.
Being a horse person, my mother was absolutely convinced she could achieve world peace if she just got the right parties together on a long enough ride. I didn't know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. I didn't know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. The three of us were pretty evenly matched, and Ben was impressed enough to ask sage how he learned to play. Turned out Sage's parents were historians, he said, so they first taught him the precursor to cribbage, a game called noddy.
"Really?" Ben asked, his professional curiosity piqued. "Your parents were historians? Did they teach?"
"European history. In Europe," Sage said. "Small college. They taught me a lot."
Yep, there was the met ~ Hilary Duff

Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance. ~ Pema Chodron

The trick is to find the style that is right for you. When it comes to trying new clothes, my advice is not to take it too seriously - it's all about having fun. ~ Twiggy

It's delicious like my favorite treat! It's definitely good to eat! ~ Nor Sanavongsay

The trick to good marketing is to make the targets feel incomplete without your product. Herein lies one of the secrets to region's success. ~ Michael Sherlock

What you're trying to do as an actor is somehow trick yourself into believing that these words have never been said, and so you've got to discover them for the first time. ~ Cate Blanchett

There is order in the universe, even though it looks like chaos. We separate the world into categories: this is good and this is bad. But life is set up to trick us. It's a series of illusions we invest in. And ultimately those investments don't serve our understanding, because physicality is always going to let you down, because physicality doesn't last. ~ Madonna Ciccone

There's no truth in acting, it's all a trick, because you go on stage in front of sets, you're on film - it's all a trick. I'm making it sound very - I really am demystifying it, but what I try to do, what I do, and I hope effectively, is to create a reality as if it is happening now, that you're fishing for words out of the air. ~ Anthony Hopkins

So here's a really stupid thing about the world: The trick to looking cool is not caring whether you look cool. So the moment you achieve perfect coolness is simultaneously the moment that you actually, completely don't care. I didn't care about the gravitas of that TV show, and the freedom and security and confidence that came with that was a rush. It took me a while to realize that the feeling I was feeling was power. ~ Hank Green

In all my time as an activist, I've never seen a single instance where the people instigating abuse, even in the worst possible cases, thought they were the 'bad guys'. There is always a righteous undertone.

Dehumanization works its mental magic, and turning the target into a 'villain' provides the attacker with the chance to be a 'hero'. You can rationalize doing all kinds of things to a symbol that you would never do to a human. The campaign becomes a false battle between good and evil, and tormenting someone is seen as a struggle over something much larger than either of you. That's the key ingredient in the magic trick that, in the abusers' minds, turns screaming at a game developer's father through a telephone into defending an entire artistic medium from censorship. ~ Zoe Quinn

The trick to happiness wasn't in freezing every momentary pleasure and clinging to each one, but in ensuring one's life would produce many future moments to anticipate. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Ideas are cheap. A dime a dozen, as they say. It's the implementation that's important! The trick isn't just to have a computer game idea, but to actually create it! ~ Scott Adams

They entered the summer parlor, where the Ravenels chatted amiably with his sisters, Phoebe and Seraphina.
Phoebe, the oldest of the Challon siblings, had inherited their mother's warm and deeply loving nature, and their father's acerbic wit. Five years ago she had married her childhood sweetheart, Henry, Lord Clare, who had suffered from a chronic illness for most of his life. The worsening symptoms had gradually reduced him to a shadow of the man he'd once been, and he'd finally succumbed while Phoebe was pregnant with their second child. Although the first year of mourning was over, Phoebe hadn't yet returned to her former self. She went outdoors so seldom that her freckles had vanished, and she looked wan and thin. The ghost of grief still lingered in her gaze.
Their younger sister, Seraphina, an effervescent eighteen-year-old with strawberry-blonde hair, was talking to Cassandra. Although Seraphina was old enough to have come out in society by now, the duke and duchess had persuaded her to wait another year. A girl with her sweet nature, her beauty, and her mammoth dowry would be targeted by every eligible man in Europe and beyond. For Seraphina, the London Season would be a gauntlet, and the more prepared she was, the better. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Sundays tend to be a day where just I do nothing but visit people. It's kind of like trick-or-treating. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

That's sort of a trick question, and I don't have a trick answer. Next question, please. ~ Shaquille O'Neal

You can be and do anything you want within true, real limits.
The trick is to define your limits with deep sincerity without confusing limits with obstacles. ~ Ben Tolosa

Young humans can be impulsive. The trick is keeping them around long enough to become old humans. ~ Martha Wells

My own funeral, I'd like to be laid out in a coffin in my own house. I would like my coffin to be put in the double parlor, and I would like all the flowers to be white. ~ Anne Rice

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward. ~ Igor Stravinsky

Our love of beauty is merely a trick produced by the way we look, and the broader the vision grows the clearer the wrinkles are seen ~ Alaa Al Aswany

What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our favorite aunt in our favorite poker parlor) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favorite poker in our favorite aunt). I knew that my sampler was absolutely right in Elsie Norris's front room, but absolutely wrong in Mrs. Virtue's sewing class. Mrs. Virtue should either have had the imagination to commend me for my effort in context, or the farsightedness to realize there is a debate going on as to whether something has an absolute as well as a relative value; given that, she should have given me the benefit of the doubt.
As it was, she got upset and blamed me for her headache. ~ Jeanette Winterson

The trick is to surrender completely, take your moments when you get them, don't dare want for more. ~ Elisa Albert

The God they preach about is pure invention, a trick. They're the first ones to not believe in Him! ~ Jose Rizal

Love is a trick best performed by men. ~ Colin Tegerdine

Hollywood's old trick: repeat a successful formula until it dies. ~ Gloria Swanson

There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act. ~ Tom Robbins

The opportunity for evil in itself does not suffice; people need a rationale as well. Consider how unpleasant, how awkward it must be when your neighbor, catching his breath (and that can happen anytime), screams, 'Why?' - or, 'Aren't you ashamed?!' It's embarrassing to stand there without a ready answer. A crowbar makes a poor rebuttal, everybody senses that. The whole trick lies in having the proper grounds to brush aside such aggravating objections. Contemptuously. Everyone wants to commit a villainy without having to feel like a villain. ~ Stanislaw Lem

All great shows, she told me when I was little (and still learning to flex the tiny muscles in my esophagus), depend on the most ordinary objects. We can be a weary, cynical lot - we grow old and see only what suits us, and what is marvelous can often pass us by. A kitchen knife. A bulb of glass. A human body. That something so common should be so surprising - why, we forget it. We take it for granted. We assume that our sight is reliable, that our deeds are straightforward, that our words have one meaning. But life is uncommon and strange; it is full of intricacies and odd, confounding turns. So onstage we remind them just how extraordinary the ordinary can be. This, she said, is the tiger in the grass. It's the wonder that hides in plain sight, the secret life that flourishes just beyond the screen. For you are not showing them a hoax or a trick, just a new way of seeing what's already in front of them. This, she told me, is your mark on the world. This is the story that you tell. ~ Leslie Parry

I had a portable 8-track player under all my ramps, cranking one of my four 8-tracks - Cars/'Candy-O,' Ramones/'Road To Ruin,' Cheap Trick/'Heaven Tonight' and the first Devo record. I don't remember skating without music. ~ Jeff Ament