Sidespin In Table Tennis Quotes

Jeremy Bentham startled the world many years ago by stating in effect that if the amount of pleasure obtained from each be equal there is nothing to choose between poetry and push-pin. Since few people now know what push-pin is, I may explain that it is a child's game in which one player tries to push his pin across that of another player, and if he succeeds and then is able by pressing down on the two pins with the ball of his thumb to lift them off the table he wins possession of his opponent's pin. [...] The indignant retort to Bentham's statement was that spiritual pleasures are obviously higher than physical pleasures. But who say so? Those who prefer spiritual pleasures. They are in a miserable minority, as they acknowledge when they declare that the gift of aesthetic appreciation is a very rare one. The vast majority of men are, as we know, both by necessity and choice preoccupied with material considerations. Their pleasures are material. They look askance at those who spent their lives in the pursuit of art. That is why they have attached a depreciatory sense to the word aesthete, which means merely one who has a special appreciation of beauty. How are we going to show that they are wrong? How are we going to show that there is something to choose between poetry and push-pin? I surmise that Bentham chose push-pin for its pleasant alliteration with poetry. Let us speak of lawn tennis. It is a popular game which many of us can play with pleasure. It needs skill and jud ~ W. Somerset Maugham

I once read that if the folds in the cerebral cortex were smoothed out it would cover a card table. That seemed quite unbelievable but it did make me wonder just how big the cortex would be if you ironed it out. I thought it might just about cover a family-sized pizza: not bad, but no card-table. I was astonished to realize that nobody seems to know the answer. A quick search yielded the following estimates for the smoothed out dimensions of the cerebral cortex of the human brain.

An article in Bioscience in November 1987 by Julie Ann Miller claimed the cortex was a "quarter-metre square." That is napkin-sized, about ten inches by ten inches. Scientific American magazine in September 1992 upped the ante considerably with an estimated of 1 1/2 square metres; thats a square of brain forty inches on each side, getting close to the card-table estimate. A psychologist at the University of Toronto figured it would cover the floor of his living room (I haven't seen his living room), but the prize winning estimate so far is from the British magazine New Scientist's poster of the brain published in 1993 which claimed that the cerebral cortex, if flattened out, would cover a tennis court. How can there be such disagreement? How can so many experts not know how big the cortex is? I don't know, but I'm on the hunt for an expert who will say the cortex, when fully spread out, will cover a football field. A Canadian football field. ~ Jay Ingram

about four inches down, he suddenly came into a small chamber in the cool-damp sand and there lay eggs, many eggs, almost perfectly round eggs the size of table tennis balls, and he laughed then because he knew. It had been a turtle. ~ Gary Paulsen

Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar. A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable - not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate, too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. "Oh my," she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, "it's fruitcake weather! ~ Truman Capote

We walked down the back stairwell into the garden where the old breakfast table used to be. 'This was my father's spot. I call it his ghost spot. My spot used to be over there, if you remember.' I pointed to where my old table used to stand by the pool.

'Did I have a spot?' he asked with a half grin.

'You'll always have a spot.'

I wanted to tell him that the pool, the garden, the house, the tennis court, the orle of paradise, the whole place, would always be his ghost spot. Instead, I pointed upstairs to the French windows of his room. Your eyes are forever there, I wanted to say, trapped in the sheer curtains, staring out from my bedroom upstairs where no one sleeps these days. When there's a breeze and they swell and I look up from down here or stand outside on the balcony, I'll catch myself thinking that you're in there, staring out from your world to my world, saying, as you did on that one night when I found you on the rock, I've been happy here. You're thousands of miles away but no sooner do I look at this window than I'll think of a bathing suit, a shirt thrown on on the fly, arms resting on the banister, and you're suddenly there, lighting up your first cigarette of the day - twenty years ago today. For as long as the house stands, this will be your ghost spot - and mine too, I wanted to say. ~ Andre Aciman

Hornergy' is Zen's term for the indomitable athletic edge powered by sexual restraint. The basketball, baseball and football teams haven't had a winning season in years. The table-tennis team, however, is undefeated. ~ Megan McCafferty

And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if they're not baselines, that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense? The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net's other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise… You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again…Mario thinks hard again. He's trying to think of how to articulate something like: But then is battling and vanquishing the self the same as destroying yourself? Is that like saying life is pro-death? … And then but so what's the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end? ~ David Foster Wallace

table tennis in the afternoon... ~ Phillip Lundberg

My application's not bought,' I am telling them, calling into the darkness of the red cave that opens out before closed eyes. 'I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I'm complex.
'I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,' I say. 'I'm not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.'

I open my eyes. 'Please don't think I don't care. ~ David Foster Wallace

Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone 'stole' an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it's carried, and what statement is made by the answering 'statement.' In other words - if Burroughs initiates a time-gate and says it works randomly, and then Norton has time gates confounded with the Perilous Seat, the Siege Perilous of the Round Table, and locates it in a bar on a rainy night - do you see both the humor and the volley in the tennis match? ~ C.J. Cherryh

Britain's counterespionage officers saw signs of treachery in everything Ivor Montagu did: they saw it in his friends, his appearance, his opinions, and his behavior. But above all, they saw it in his passionate, and dubious, love of table tennis. ~ Ben Macintyre

Vivian was not alone in thinking that a man who spent so much time discussing table tennis was probably a spy. ~ Ben Macintyre

Although it often struggles to be heard in respectable circles, there is an alternative to the Christian-Romantic tenet that sex and love should always be inseparable. The libertine position denies any inherent or logical link between loving someone and needing to be unfailingly sexually loyal to them. It proposes that it can be entirely natural and even healthy for partners in a couple occasionally to have sex with strangers for whom they have little feeling but to whom they nonetheless feel strongly attracted. Sex doesn't always have to be bound up with love. It can sometimes – this philosophy holds – be a purely physical, aerobic activity engaged in without substantive emotional meaning. It is, so its adherents conclude, just as absurd to suppose that one should only ever have sex with the person one loves as it would be to require that only those in committed couples ever be permitted to play table tennis or go jogging together. ~ Alain De Botton

The waitress delivered me a plate of towering blueberry pancakes dripping in butter. The sweet scent of the fluffy goodness had my stomach rumbling in appreciation. I pushed back my tall glass of orange juice to make way for the food that was about to be introduced to my belly. I swirled my finger around in a giant pad of softening butter and brought it to my lips as the waitress handed Holt his own stack of pancakes plus a plate loaded with scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast. When she was gone, I reached for the syrup.
"Are you trying to kill me?" Holt said, leaning over the table and stabbing his fork in my direction.
I glanced dubiously at the fork. "Are you trying to kill me?"
He grinned. "You can't just go around licking your fingers like that, Freckles. It makes a man forget he's in a public place."
I laughed and dug into my pancakes, shoving an unladylike bite into my mouth and then groaning as the sweetness slid over my tongue.
"There you go again," he said, his eyes darkening with desire.
"Wasn't last night and this morning enough for you?" I asked playfully.
"I don't think I'll ever get enough of you. ~ Cambria Hebert

He saw a chamber, broad and low, designed, in its every rich stain of picture and slumberous hanging, to appeal to the sensuous. And here the scent was thick and motionless. Costly marqueterie; Palissy candlesticks reflected in half-concealed mirrors framed in embossed silver; antique Nankin vases brimming with pot-pourri; in one comer a suit of Milanese armour, fluted, damasquinee, by Felippo Negroli; in another a tripod table of porphyry, spectrally repeating in its polished surface the opal hues of a vessel of old Venetian glass half filled with some topaz-coloured liqueur - such and many more tokens of a luxurious aestheticism wrought in the observer an immediate sense of pleasurable enervation. He noticed, with a swaying thrill of delight, that his feet were on a padded rug of Astrakhan - one of many, disposed eccentrically about the yellow tassellated-marble floor; and he noticed that the sole light in the chamber came from an iridescent globed lamp, fed with some fragrant oil, that hung near an alcove traversed by a veil of dark violet silk.

("The Accursed Cordonnier") ~ Bernard Capes

There's always a pattern in order to make a thing, but the starting point must be something I've never seen before. It's not two-dimensional, but it's like a sample. I work with patterns like a sculptor. I try to get [the team] not to work on a body, [but] to work on a free space, on a table. The work is basically on flat surfaces. ~ Rei Kawakubo

The same animal which hath the honour to have some part of his flesh eaten at the table of a duke, may perhaps be degraded in another part,and some of his limbs gibbeted, as it were, in the vilest stall in town. ~ Henry Fielding

Bet you didn't know that when you agreed to be 'betrothed' to me, huh? Husband-eviscerating apparently runs in my family."
Still no reaction, and I felt shame curl in my belly. "Of course, you also didn't know you were getting a damon bride," I added in a softer tone. Very few people knew what my dad really was. I'd always assumed Cal had found out the same night I did.
That's why I was really surprised when he raised his head and said, "I knew."
"What?"
"I knew what you were then, Sophie. Your dad told me before the betrothal. And he told me about your grandmother, and what happened to your grandfather."
I shook my head. "Then,why?"
Cal took his time before answering. "For one thing, I like your dad. He's done good things for Prodigium. And it-" He broke off with a long exhale. "It felt like some kind of honor, you know? Being asked to be the head of the Council's son-in-law. Plus, your dad, he,uh,told me a lot about you."
My voice was barely above a whisper. "What did he say?"
"That you were smart, and strong. Funny. That you had trouble using your powers, but you were always trying to use them to help people." He shrugged. "I thought we'd be a good match."
The vast dining room suddenly felt very small, like it consisted only of this table and me and Cal. "Look, Sophie," he started to say.
But before he could finish, Jenna walked in. "I am so glad I still get to eat human food, because that bacon smells insane..." she said, ~ Rachel Hawkins

The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.
It always wins because it is everywhere.
It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun, and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.
The brightest light casts the darkest shadow. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover

What the devil was Davy doing up there with a marlinespike? That's what I'd like to know. It's a sailors duty."
She put her head in her hands. "I'm afraid that's my fault, too. I'd been talking to him about moving up to the forecastle, and I…I think he wanted to impress me."
Gray choked on a laugh. "Well, of course he did. You ought to take care how you bat those eyelashes, sweetheart. One of these days, you're likely to knock a man overboard."
The legs of her chair scraped the floor as she stood. The color returned to her cheeks. "If Davy was trying to impress me, it's as much your fault as mine."
"How is that my fault?" Gray's frustration came right back to a boil. He hated himself for growling at her, but he couldn't seem to help it.
"You're the one who humiliated him in front of the crew, with all those questions. You goaded him into saying he…well, you know what he said."
"Yes, I know what he said." Gray stepped toward her until only the table separated them. "I know what he said. And don't pretend you didn't enjoy it. Don't pretend you don't use those men to feed your vanity."
"My vanity? What would you know about feeding my vanity? You don't so much as breathe in my direction. At least the sailors speak to me. And if that entire 'Kind of the Sea' display wasn't one long exercise in feeding your own vanity, I'm sure I don't know what is." She jabbed one finger on the tabletop and lowered her voice. "Those men may flirt with me, but the ~ Tessa Dare

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? ~ William Shakespeare

I like to think what I bring to the table is kind of a sympathetic and endearing quality, even while I'm playing outcasts or characters that end up in outlandish situations. ~ Jason Biggs

If Amy had one ounce of romance in her soul, she would be sighing with gratification. Instead, she said acerbically, "All that's missing is the love poem."
Jermyn deposited her in a chair by the table. "I'll order a pen and ink for you. ~ Christina Dodd

My fault? How the hell is this"
I waved my arm across the table
my fault?"
"You know we don't believe in hell, so stop using that word in our presence," Bridie said.
"Fine. How in fucked-up fairyland is this my fault? ~ Barbra Annino

AFTERNOON TEA---
GUIDELINES FOR YOUNG OFFICERS' WIVES
By Audrey J. Rudman

Use your loveliest tablecloth. Have fresh flowers on the table. In winter, candles may be lit. Colored candles are sometimes seen, but white are in better taste.
Offer small fancy cakes, plain cookies, and tiny sandwiches, with a choice of fillings. Meat paste or cucumber are always acceptable. The service of tea is presided over by the ranking officer's wife. The courtesy should be extended to the CO's wife, if she cares to pour. ~ Laurie Graham

When we reached our hall, Nee offered to share hot chocolate with me. Shaking my head, I pleaded tiredness
true enough
and retreated to my rooms.
And discovered something lying on the little table in the parlor where letters and invitations were supposed to be put.
Moving slowly across the room, I looked down at an exquisite porcelain sphere. It was dark blue, with silver stars all over it, and so cunningly painted that when I looked closer it gave the illusion of depth
as if I stared deeply into the sky.
Lifting it with reverent care, I opened it and saw, sitting on a white silk nest, a lovely sapphire ring. Trying it on my fingers, I found to my delight it fit my longest one.
Why couldn't Bran give me this in person? There were times when I found my brother incomprehensible, but I knew he thought the same of me.
Puzzled, but content, I fell asleep with my ringed hand cradled against my cheek. ~ Sherwood Smith

How did he get here? What drew him back? Easy answer: the monkey bars. Not-so-easy answer ... What took him away in the first place? Gyroscopic deflections are only partly to blame. Who can stop a revolving planet? Who can predict where on the table a spinning quarter will fall flat? ~ Jay Nichols

I've played hockey most my life and I've never been badly injured ... Three weeks into curling I've got bone chips in both my elbows. I still can't lean on a table. I've even got curling injuries, believe it or not, just from falling on my arse. ~ James Allodi

I slunk
off in the direction of the cocktail table - the only place in
the garden where a single man could linger without looking
purposeless and alone. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Life expectancy in America is about 79, we should be able to live to 92. Somewhere along the line, we're leaving 13 years on the table. So my quest is
how do we get those extra 13 years? And how do we make those extra 13 years good years? ~ Dan Buettner

Let us accept the possibility that there is, at death, not an abrupt cessation of energy, rather a dispersal. This seems more than reasonable to me. Mind you, I've owned a series of old cars, and Im used to turning off the motor only to experience a series of rumblings and explosions that would shame many a volcano. This is the sort of thing I'm conceptualizing, a kind of clunky running-on. And just as some cars are more susceptible to this behavior, so people vary in the length of time, and the force with which, their energy sputters and gasps ... My example is overly dramatic, but it is not wholly unreasonable, and it serves to make this genetic mutation a player at the evolutionary table. You see what I'm getting at: a biologically and evolutionally sound model for the soul. (I didn't say I'd achieved it.) Let's conceive of the soul as an aura that human beings wear on their backs, cumberson as a tortoise's carapace. Some are larger than others. ~ Paul Quarrington

We talked into the night, the room blurring around us as it had done at the dance in West Side Story when Tony and Maria first saw each other across a crowd of people. Tonight, tonight, it all began tonight. My friends giggled and sipped wine at the table where I'd abandoned them earlier in the night, oblivious to the fact that their redheaded amiga had just been struck by a lightning bolt.
Before I could internally break into the second chorus of song, my version of Tony--this mysterious cowboy--announced abruptly that he had to go. Go? I thought. Go where? There's no place on earth but this smoky bar…But there was for him: he and his brother had plans to cook Christmas turkeys for some needy folks in his small town. Mmmm. He's nice, too, I thought as a pang stabbed my insides.
"Bye," he said with a gentle smile. And with that, his delicious boots walked right out of the J-Bar, his dark blue Wranglers cloaking a body that I was sure had to have been chiseled out of granite. My lungs felt tight, and I still smelled his scent through the bar smoke in the air. I didn't even know his name. I prayed it wasn't Billy Bob. ~ Ree Drummond

There are many memories. but I'll tell you the one I like to think of best of all. It's just a homely everyday thing, but to me it is the happiest of them all. It is evening time here in the old house and the supper is cooking and the table is set for the whole family. It hurts a mother, Laura, when the plates begin to be taken away one by one. First there are seven and then six and then five...and on down to a single plate. So I like to think of the table set for the whole family at supper time. The robins are singing in the cottonwoods and the late afternoon sun is shining across the floor... The children are playing out in the yard. I can hear their voices and happy laughter. There isn't much to that memory is there? Out of a lifetime of experiences you would hardly expect that to be the one I would choose as the happiest, would you? But it is. ~ Bess Streeter Aldrich

But there's this way he drums his fingers on the table. Not even like really drumming. More like in-way between drumming and like this scratching, picking, the way you see somebody picking at dead skin. And without any kind of rhythm, see, constant and never-stopping but with no kind of rhythm you could grab onto and follow and stand. Totally like whacked, insane. Like the kind of sounds you can imagine a girl hears in her head right before she kills her whole family because somebody took the last bit of peanut butter or something. You know what I'm saying? The sound of a fucking mind coming apart. You know what I'm saying? So yeah, yes, OK, the short answer is when he wouldn't quit with the drumming at supper I sort of poked him with my fork. Sort of. I could see how maybe somebody could have thought I sort of stabbed him. I offered to get the fork out, though. Let me just say I'm ready to make amends at like anytime. For my part in it. I'm owning my part in it is what I'm saying. Can I ask am I going to get Restricted for this? Cause I have this Overnight tomorrow that Gene he approved already in the Overnight Log. If you want to look. But I'm not trying to get out of owning my part of the, like, occurrence. If my Higher Power who I choose to call God works through you saying I've got some kind of a punishment due, I won't try to get out of a punishment. If I've got one due. I just wanted to ask. Did I mention I'm grateful to be here? ~ David Foster Wallace

Ryzek will be in a huge crowd of people, many of whom are his most ardent supporters and fiercest soldiers. What kind of 'move' do you suggest we make?"
Cyra replied, "You said it yourself, didn't you? Kill him."
"Oh, right!" Teka smacked the table, obviously annoyed. "Why didn't I think of killing him? How simple!"
Cyra rolled her eyes. "This time you won't have to sneak into his house while he's asleep. This time, I'll challenge him to the arena."
Everybody got quiet again. For different reasons, Akos was sure. Cyra was a good fighter, everybody knew that, but no one knew how good Ryzek was--they hadn't seen him in action. And then there was the matter of getting to a place where Cyra could actually challenge him. And getting him to do it instead of just arresting her.
"Cyra," Akos said.
"He declared nemhalzak--he erased your status, your citizenship," Teka said, talking over him. "He has no reason to honor your challenge."
"Of course he does." Isae was frowning. "He could have gotten rid of her quietly when he learned she was a renegade, but he didn't. He wanted her disgrace, and her death, to be public. That means he's afraid of her, afraid she has power over Shotet. If she challenges hi in front of everyone, he won't be able to back down. He'll look like a coward."
"Cyra," Akos said again, quiet this time.
"Akos," Cyra answered, with just a touch of the gentleness he had seen in the stairwell. "He is no match for me."
The ~ Veronica Roth

Did you ever notice how very fickle males are?" she asked the horse. "And how very foolish females are about them?" she added, aware of how inexplicably deflated she felt. She realized as well that she was being completely irrational-she had not intended to come here, had not wanted him to be waiting, and now she felt almost like crying because he wasn't!
Giving the ribbons of her bonnet an impatient jerk, she untied them. Pulling the bonnet off, she pushed the back door of the cottage open, stepped inside-and froze in shock!
Standing at the opposite side of the small room, his back to her, was Ian Thornton. His dark head was slightly bent as he gazed at the cheery little fire crackling in the fireplace, his hands shoved into the back waistband of his gray riding breeches, his booted foot upon the grate. He'd taken off his jacket, and beneath his soft lawn shirt his muscles flexed as he withdrew his right hand and shoved it through the side of his hair. Elizabeth's gaze took in the sheer male beauty of his wide, masculine shoulders, his broad back and narrow waist.
Something in the somber way he was standing-added to the fact that he'd waited more than two hours for her-made her doubt her earlier conviction that he hadn't truly cared whether she came or not. And that was before she glanced sideways and saw the table. Her heart turned over when she saw the trouble he'd taken: A cream linen tablecloth covered with crude china, obviously borrowed from Charise's h ~ Judith McNaught

People wanted to see Rey Mysterio and PsIcosis in a match, and we had such a great chemistry. I don't think there was anyone at that time who could match what we were bringing to the table. ~ Oscar Gutierrez