Roll Into A Ball Quotes

But when he crested the hill, the sight that greeted him made him pause. At the bottom of the hill stood Celia in a riding habit, her gun pointed in his direction. He halted just as she spotted him.
After emptying the gun by firing it in the opposite direction, she set it on the ground facing away from them, picked up her skirts, and came up the hill with fire in her eyes. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?" she cried.
Only then did he notice the target that was set into the hill below him. So this was where she did her shooting practice. He should have known she'd have a secret spot for it.
"Pardon me for interrupting," he said dryly as she approached. "When I heard shots, I thought it was poachers."
"And you were going to confront them alone?" She planted her hands on her hips. "What if there were several, armed and ready to shoot?"
The very idea made him roll his eyes. "In my experience, poachers run when they see someone coming. They don't brandish guns." He couldn't resist taunting her. "You're the only person who does that, my lady."
At his use of her title, she stiffened. "Well, you could have been hurt all the same. You really mustn't sneak up on people like that. And what are you doing up so early, anyway?" Her eyes narrowed. "You can't be going to London-you're heading in the wrong direction."
"I'm off to High Wycombe. Apparently your old nurse lives there, so I'm going to question her about the events on the morning of your p ~ Sabrina Jeffries

Despite the loud booing from Shari and Greg, Bird managed to punch the ball past the shortstop for a single.
"Lucky hit!" Greg yelled, cupping his hands into a megaphone.
Bird pretended not to hear him. ~ R.L. Stine

I think there's a lot of different things that factor into playing good defense, and you just can't say, "All right, if we just hold on to the ball long enough, we're going to play good defense." ~ Chip Kelly

West Baltimore. You sit on your stoop, you drink Colt 45 from a brown paper bag and you watch the radio car roll slowly around the corner. You see the gunman, you hear the shots, you gather on the far corner to watch the paramedics load what remains of a police officer into the rear of an ambulance. Then you go back to your rowhouse, open another can, and settle in front of the television to watch the replay on the eleven o'clock news. Then you go back to the stoop. ~ David Simon

It doesn't take much. A poem. A catch. A glance. A roll of the dice. And it doesn't matter what's true and what isn't. Doesn't matter what you think you know about yourself. The things you have the guts to tell people and the things you don't. You get your label, and then you get ignored, or sometimes you get teased, but mostly you go about your business, thinking things that you would never say out loud, not to someone's face.
But there are some words you know you can't say. Not out loud, not without getting into serious trouble. You might whisper them to your friends, but you would never write them down. Instead you find some other way. A secret code. An inside joke… And everyone knows what it means, but nobody says anything. ~ John David Anderson

I have understood now that after feelings of disappointment subside, and one gains perspective, these experiences can change our ways of thinking, and bring us face to face with existential issues. When that happens, we need to embrace the events and analyze how we responded - did we allow them to merely roll over us like waves, or did we dive deeper into the matter and use it to gain insights into ourselves? ~ A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

She nodded, but looked off into the distance, keeping her weight on her uninjured ankle. "Uh...I have to go...you know...I have to go."

He looked up at her, his brow furrowed. "Go where?"

"Oh my god. Shoot me now," she said, fisting her hands.

"I'm trying to-oh." His eyes lit up with comprehension. He dug around in the bag a little bit, and handed her a roll of toilet paper. "Here."

She eyed his bag hopefully. "You got a toilet and shower in there, too, Eagle Scout?"

He laughed. "I wish. It's not so bad, I promise."

"Maybe not for you," she pointed out. "At least you get to stand. I have to squat with my bare butt hanging out with a white flag for all the forest creatures. ~ Diane Alberts

Fifteen minutes later I'm hunched over the steering wheel of a two-seater that looks like something you'd find in your corn flakes packet. The Smart is insanely cute and compact, does about seventy miles to a gallon, and is the ideal second car for nipping about town but I'm not nipping about town. I'm going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes. Meanwhile, I'm stuck driving something that handles like a turbocharged baby buggy. I've got my fog lights on in a vain attempt to deter the other road users from turning me into a hood ornament, but the jet wash every time another executive panzer overtakes me keeps threatening to roll me right over onto my roof. And that's before you factor in the deranged Serbian truck drivers driven mad with joy by exposure to a motorway that hasn't been cluster-bombed and then resurfaced by the lowest bidder. ~ Charles Stross

On our way down, we passed a two-story villa, hidden in a thicket of Chinese parasol trees, magnolia, and pines. It looked almost like a random pile of stones against the background of the rocks. It struck me as an unusually lovely place, and I snapped my last shot. Suddenly a man materialized out of nowhere and asked me in a low but commanding voice to hand over my camera. He wore civilian clothes, but I noticed he had a pistol. He opened the camera and exposed my entire roll of film. Then he disappeared, as if into the earth. Some tourists standing next to me whispered that this was one of Mao's summer villas. I felt another pang of revulsion toward Mao, not so much for his privilege, but for the hypocrisy of allowing himself luxury while telling his people that even comfort was bad for them. After we were safely out of earshot of the invisible guard, and I was bemoaning the loss of my thirty-six pictures, Jin-ming gave me a grin: "See where goggling at holy places gets you!"

We left Lushan by bus. Like every bus in China, it was packed, and we had to crane our necks desperately trying to breathe. Virtually no new buses had been built since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, during which time the urban population had increased by several tens of millions. After a few minutes, we suddenly stopped. The front door was forced open, and an authoritative-looking man in plainclothes squeezed in.

"Get down! Get down!" he barked.

"Some Amer ~ Jung Chang

I couldn't do anything except curl up like a ball on the floor of the barn and lie there, crying. The kind of tears that burn your eyes, and the sort of sobs that make your chest ache so that you're sure it's going to bust open. And when the sobs finally ran out, the tears kept coming, so I lay there with my mouth wide open, but I hardly made a sound. Just air going into me, and a heavy wind full of sorrow coming out. But as I cried, my heart was being transformed. It was getting smaller and smaller in my chest and hardening up like a rock. The smaller and harder my heart got, the less I cried, until finally I stopped completely. By the time I was finished, my heart was small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. It was so hard nobody could break it and so sharp it would hurt anybody who touched it ~ Katherine Hannigan

Every quarterback can throw a ball; every running back can run; every receiver is fast; but that mental toughness that you talk about translates into competitiveness. ~ Tom Brady

Solitude is the surest nurse of all prurient passions, and a girl in the hurry of preparation, or tumult of gaiety, has neither inclination nor leisure to let tender expressions soften or sink into her heart. The ball, the show, are not the dangerous places: no, 'tis the private friend, the kind consoler, the companion of the easy vacant hour, whose compliance with her opinions can flatter her vanity, and whose conversation can sooth, without ever stretching her mind, that is the lover to be feared: he who buzzes in her ear at court, or at the opera, must be contented to buzz in vain. ~ Samuel Johnson

When she first arrived, Mi-ran was impressed. The dormitories were modern and each of the four girls who would share one room had her own bed rather than use the Korean bed mats laid out on a heated floor, the traditional way of keeping warm at night while expending little fuel. But as winter temperatures plunged Chongjin into a deep freeze, she realized why it was that the school had been able to give her a place in its freshman class. The dormitories had no heating. Mi-ran went to sleep each night in her coat, heavy socks, and mitten with a towel draped over her head. When she woke up, the towel would be crusted with frost from the moisture of her breath. In the bathroom, where the girls washed their menstrual rags (nobody had sanitary napkins, so the more affluent girls used gauze bandages while the poor girls used cheap synthetic cloths), it was so cold that the rags would freeze solid within minutes of being hung up to dry. Mi-ran hated the mornings. Just as in Jun-sang's school, they were roused by a military-style roll call at 6:00 A.M., but instead of marching off like proud soldiers, they shivered into the bathroom and splashed icy water on their faces, under a grotesque canopy of frozen menstrual rags. ~ Barbara Demick

On hearing the jingle of harness behind them, they turned. Melletin and Yelena were fast catching up, both grinning broadly.

"How did it go?" Ramil called.

"Would you believe it: he threatened to lock me up in his mother's house if I didn't behave!" exclaimed Yelena, sticking her tongue out at Melletin. "I threw a roll at him and he clipped me around the ear. The soldiers were all about to beat him up when I burst into tears and begged his forgiveness. We had a passionate reconciliation and went on our way with their good wishes for our marital harmony."

Melletin rubbed his lips. "Where's the next checkpoint, Yelena? I can't wait to do that again."

"Watch it, sir: I'll report you," Yelena threatened, but she looked very pleased all the same. ~ Julia Golding

The Moon is a ball of left-over debris from a cosmic collision that took place more than four billion years ago. A Mars-sized asteroid - one of the countless planetesimals that were frantically churning our solar system into existence - hit the infant Earth, bequeathing it a very large natural satellite. ~ Seth Shostak

Kids don't care about rock and roll as much as they used to, as the other generations have. It's already turned into nothing but a fashion statement and an identity for kids to use as a tool for them to fuck and have a social life. ~ Kurt Cobain

Many caterpillars defend themselves not by striking fear in the hearts of their predators, but rather indifference. The large maple spanworm looks like a twig; the viceroy caterpillar looks like a bird dropping. This is not as exciting as looking like an anaconda, but when you are very small, and wingless, one of your main goals in life is to not be exciting. And speaking of unexciting - I think it is safe to say that woolly bears have one of the least advanced defense mechanisms among insects, although theirs is the reaction with which I most strongly identify: when distressed, the woolly bear rolls up into a ball. ~ Amy Leach

When you visit Gindaco, spend some time watching the cooks make takoyaki before ordering, because it's an amazing free show. The shop has an industrial-sized takoyaki griddle with dozens of hot cast iron wells, each one about an inch and a half in diameter. The cook squirts the grill with plenty of vegetable oil. She dunks a pitcher into a barrel of pancake batter and sloshes it over the grill, then strews the whole area with negi, ginger, and huge, tender octopus chunks. Some of Gindaco's purple tentacles are two inches long. This cooks for a little while, then the cook tops off the grill with more batter until it's nearly full.
Up to this point, the process looks haphazard, but then she whips out the skewers. Using only the same slender bamboo skewers you'd use for making kebabs, she begins slicing through the batter in a grid pattern and forming a ball in each well. Somehow she herds this ocean of batter into a grid of takoyaki in a minute or two.
The takoyaki cost all of 500 yen, and the price includes a wooden serving boat that you can take home and reuse as a bath toy if you haven't gotten too much sauce on it. A Gindaco takoyaki is a brilliant morsel: full of flavor from the negi and ginger, crispy on the outside and juicy within. Takoyaki also stay mouth-searingly hot inside for longer than you can stand to wait, so be careful. ~ Matthew Amster-Burton

Andrea turned her back to Desandra and rolled her eyes. Raphael grimaced. They both looked scandalized. Dear God, what could she have said to scandalize a bouda ...
"No, really!" Desandra nodded. "Okay, so most guys don't have a nice ball sack, right? It looks all hairy and wrinkled like some small animal died between their legs, but Gerardo's is like two plums in a velvet bag ... "
Derek, who'd been lingering in the doorway, took a careful step to the left behind the wall and disappeared from my view.
Kill me, somebody. I raised my hand. "Hold that thought. I need to borrow Andrea for a minute."
I grabbed her arm and pulled her into the hallway. Behind us Raphael growled, "Don't leave me!"
Andrea leaned towards me. "Plums."
"Listen ... "
Andrea raised her hands, imitating holding plums the size of small coconuts, and moved them up and down. ~ Ilona Andrews

Aomame established several classes in her best area, women's self-defense techniques. She made a large canvas dummy in the shape of a man, sewed a black work glove in the groin area to serve as testicles, and gave female club members thorough training in how to kick in that spot. In the interest of realism, she stuffed two squash balls into the glove. The women were to kick this target swiftly, mercilessly, and repeatedly. Many of them took special pleasure in this training, and their skill improved markedly, but other members (mostly men, of course) viewed the spectacle with a frown and complained to the club's management that she was going overboard.

As a result, Aomame was called in and instructed to rein in the ball-kicking practice ~ Haruki Murakami

Bobby JonesConsidered objectively, it is quite obviously a very simple matter to propel a ball with a stick across some specially prepared ground and into a hole which is of sufficient size to accomodate it by a good margin. Simple that is, provided there is no limit upon the time or the number of strokes required. ~ Bobby Jones

I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

And when the universe has finished exploding all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all begin to fall towards the centre of the universe again. And then there will be nothing to stop us seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be moving towards us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling. ~ Mark Haddon

I'm definitely one of those people that what comes into my head falls out of my mouth. That's a way for me to be even more creative, to sort of get the ball rolling and start parlaying off of somebody and interacting. That charge or that friction sometimes - if it's positive or negative - is inspiring, and it gets people to be I think creative, maybe. ~ Giovanni Ribisi

She didn't look up until he was gone. She saw him pas the outside wall of the pavilion and heard his footsteps recede into the stairwell. When he was gone, she bowed her head and let the grief engulf her. Her heart crumpled and shrank, like a ball of paper set on fire. ~ Suzanne Fisher Staples

Vin," he said flatly, "did you just suggest that we attend a ball being held in the middle of a city we're besieging?"
"You think it's a good idea," Vin said, smiling impishly.
"It's a crazy idea," Elend said. "I'm emperor - I shouldn't be sneaking into the enemy city so I can go to a party."
Vin narrowed her eyes, staring at him.
"I will admit, however," Elend said, "that the concept does have considerable charm. ~ Brandon Sanderson

She reaches in, digs her hand deep into the ball, and pulls out a slip of paper. The crowd draws in a collective breath, and then you can hear a pin drop, and I'm feeling nauseous and so desperately hoping that it's not me, that it's not me, that it's not me.
Effie Trinket crosses back to the podium, smoothes the slip of paper, and reads out the name in a clear voice. And it's not me.
It's Primrose Everdeen. ~ Suzanne Collins

It's important to realize that everybody who went into country music, and most everybody who went into rock and roll in the '50s, they had no more goal than a hit on the jukebox. Johnny Cash from the very beginning had a goal that he wanted to make music that lifted people's spirits. ~ Robert Hilburn

Bobby ran up on the deck and skidded to a stop in front of them. "It's time for the Kowalski Fourth of July Football Game of Doom!"
Cat laughed and pushed herself out of her seat. "We'll talk about this some other time, Emma. Go have fun."
"I'm not sure I want to play football. Especially if there's doom involved," she said, but Bobby grabbed her hand and dragged her off the deck.
They were divvied up into teams roughly by size, each with an assortment of men, women and children. Emma was on Sean's team, which was good. She'd just hide behind him, because the only thing she knew about football was that it involved a lot of hitting.
It only took a few plays to see that the Kowalskis played by their own rules and the few they had were fluid. Mostly they served to ensure the smaller kids didn't get plowed over, victims of the adults' competitive streak.
Five minutes into the game, Emma somehow ended up with the ball. She squealed and looked around for somebody - anybody - to hand it off to, but there was nobody. Well, there was Danny, but he was doubled over in laughter.
"Run, Emma," Lisa yelled.
She ran in the direction her friend was frantically waving her hand, but she only went a few feet before two very strong arms wrapped around her waist and then she was falling. Luckily, she landed on a body instead of the ground.
"I love football," Mitch said, grinning up at her.
Emma grimaced and managed to get one of her knees on solid grou ~ Shannon Stacey

Shepley walked out of his bedroom pulling a T-shirt over his head. His eyebrows pushed together. "Did they just leave?"

"Yeah," I said absently, rinsing my cereal bowl and dumping Abby's leftover oatmeal in the sink. She'd barely touched it.

"Well, what the hell? Mare didn't even say goodbye."

"You knew she was going to class. Quit being a cry baby."

Shepley pointed to his chest. "I'm the cry baby? Do you remember last night?"

"Shut up."

"That's what I thought." He sat on the couch and slipped on his sneakers. "Did you ask Abby about her birthday?"

"She didn't say much, except that she's not into birthdays."

"So what are we doing?"

"Throwing her a party." Shepley nodded, waiting for me to explain. "I thought we'd surprise her. Invite some of our friends over and have America take her out for a while."

Shepley put on his white ball cap, pulling it down so low over his brows I couldn't see his eyes. "She can manage that. Anything else?"

"How do you feel about a puppy?"

Shepley laughed once. "It's not my birthday, bro."

I walked around the breakfast bar and leaned my hip against the stool. "I know, but she lives in the dorms. She can't have a puppy."

"Keep it here? Seriously? What are we going to do with a dog?"

"I found a Cairn Terrier online. It's perfect."

"A what?"

"Pidge is ~ Jamie McGuire

I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first of all, has got to be put into the context of being an American cultural showcase. It's there to be a museum showcase of all that's great about American music. ~ Ian Anderson

Now when those dark times happen, I curl into a ball on my cot and make a cape with my blanket. I remind myself I am not dust, but I should be. I tell myself I am made of the same cells as life itself even if I am a mistake. ~ Rene Denfeld