Sledgehammer Quotes

Rule Number One is this: If you're open to learning, you get your life-lessons delivered as gently as the tickle of a feather. But if you're defensive, if you stubbornly persist in being right instead of learning the lesson at hand, if you stop paying attention to the tickles, the nudges, the clues - boom! Sledgehammer. ~ Gay Hendricks

Wanting people to listen, you can't just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you'll notice you've got their strict attention. ~ Kevin Spacey

He doesn't move.

Please, I beg him inwardly.

Please go up to bed.

It's hard enough to look at his face each day and not feel heartbreak. I can't be close to him right now. I'm afraid I'll give in and kiss him again. The way his hard body had aligned so perfectly with mine is burned in my consciousness. I'll be trying not to remember that for weeks.

I wait, and I ache.

Finally the door clicks open. I hear him exit the car. When the door slams shut, I feel it like a sledgehammer to the heart.

Don't look, I coach myself.

But my self-control isn't infinite. His fair hair glints under the streetlight as his long legs eat up the walkway in just a few paces. Seeing him walk away from me splinters something inside me. ~ Sarina Bowen

Why use a sledgehammer when a butterfly net will suffice? ~ Thea Harrison

ISIS is a monstrosity. It didn't come from nowhere. It's one of the results of the U.S. hitting a very vulnerable society - Iraq - with a sledgehammer. ~ Noam Chomsky

Your writing", she said to me, "it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness ... ~ Charles Bukowski

You'll see! We're going to the palace. Fetch Angua. We might need her. And bring the search warrant.
You mean the sledgehammer, sir?
Yes. ~ Terry Pratchett

Maybe things happen for a reason but that reason is stupid... I am a flat tire and you are a pothole full of lug nuts. I am a pile of bricks and you are holding a sledgehammer, which is to say I would not exist without you. ~ Neil Hilborn

You don't live in the past; you take a sledgehammer to it to see what stands so that you can build on it. ~ Samuel L. Drew

Unless you hit your television with a sledgehammer, you're not going to be able to be an individual. ~ Justin Theroux

What we want, of course, what lies in the cupboard marked 'important,' is connection, love: If the deepest source of human hunger had a name, that would be it; if the boxes of constraint in which so many women live could be smashed to bits, that would be the tool, the sledgehammer that shatters emptiness and uncovers the hope buried beneath it. ~ Caroline Knapp

I think topical songwriting is a real gift, and it's hard not to be pedantic and show up with the sledgehammer message. ~ Mary Chapin Carpenter

The head of the sledgehammer was cold, icy cold, and it touched his forehead as gently as a kiss.
'Pock! There,' said Czernobog. 'Is done.' There was a smile on his face that Shadow had never seen before, an easy, comfortable smile, like sunshine on a summer's day. The old man walked over to the case, and he put the hammer away, and closed the bag, and pushed it back under the sideboard.
'Czernobog?' asked Shadow. Then, 'Are you Czernobog?'
'Yes. For today,' said the old man. 'By tomorrow, it will all be Bielebog. But today, is still Czernobog.'
'Then why? Why didn't you kill me when you could?'
The old man took out an unfiltered cigarette from a pack in his pocket. He took a large box of matches from the mantelpiece and lit the cigarette with a match. He seemed deep in thought. 'Because,' said the old man, after some time, 'there is blood. But there is also gratitude. And it has been a long, long winter. ~ Neil Gaiman

Grief is one of those ideas you think you understand until you meet it face-to-face, gut-to-gut. After a sledgehammer of an introduction it insults you further by taking up residence deep inside your soul. It has the obnoxious melodrama of a teenage girl and the hormonal pulse of a bitter pregnant woman – not to mention the nocturnal stamina of a fucking vampire. ~ Marley Jacobs

At that exact moment, Nancy Grace, a CNN legal commentator who combines the nuance of a sledgehammer with the social graces of a harpy.. ~ Charles P. Pierce

It started slow and hit her with the force of a sledgehammer, a cataclysm of such power she could only hold on to him and let it happen. He went rigid against her, rock hard in her arms, and he probably muttered "oh, shit" again, but she was beyond hearing, lost in some mind-scattered cloud of inexpressible pleasure. She fell back, limp, awash in shimmering sensation, and she knew an odd, faint trace of regret that he'd used a condom. She'd wanted all of him inside her, a total giving, and he'd withheld something. ~ Anne Stuart

Oh, thank goodness you're here," the priest said. "I think this poor boy tried to kill himself with a sledgehammer. ~ Joey Comeau

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars. ~ Alice Hoffman

Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they'd fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn't help it. Life was a compulsive salesman. ~ Glen Duncan

It is the direct man who strikes sledgehammer blows, who penetrates the very marrow of a subject at every stroke and gets the meat out of a proposition, who does things. ~ Orison S. Marden

Rather than going after these walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them, and smell them and get to know them well. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to build these walls: what are the stories we tell ourselves? What repels me and what attracts me? Without calling what we see right or wrong, we simply look as objectively as we can. We can observe ourselves with humor, not getting overly serious, moralistic or uptight about the investigation. Year after year, we train in remaining open and receptive to whatever arises. Slowly, very slowly, the cracks in the walls seem to widen and, as if by magic, bodhichitta is able to flow freely. ~ Pema Chodron

Reformed theology isn't a sledgehammer with which to hit people, it's a pillow on which they can lay their weary heads. ~ Burk Parsons

The reason I prefer the sledgehammer to the rapier and the reason I believe in blunt, violent, confrontational forms for the presentation of my ideas is because I see that what's happening to the lives of people is not rapierlike, it is not gentle, it is not subtle. It is direct, hard and violent. The slow violence of poverty, the slow violence of untreated disease. Of unemployment, hunger, discrimination. This isn't the violence of some guy opening fire with an Uzi in a McDonald's and forty people are dead. The real violence that goes on every day, unheard, unreported, over and over, multiplied a millionfold. ~ George Carlin

When I was a young fellow I was knocked down plenty. I wanted to stay down, but I couldn't. I had to collect the two dollars for winning or go hungry. I had to get up. I was one of those hungry fighters. You could have hit me on the chin with a sledgehammer for five dollars. When you haven't eaten for two days you'll understand. ~ Jack Dempsey

I mean ... who was it that said if the door is locked, find a window. If the windows locked, well ... break it. If it won't break then find a freaking sledgehammer and make a new one. ~ C.C. Hunter

When you're a sledgehammer, you don't need to be unobvious. You just need one good hit. ~ Stylo Fantome

He'd never experienced hate before. It was like an ulcer growing on a tumor, festering and stinking. Late at night or between dreams and sleep, he'd get into it, bathing in the venom, wallowing in thoughts of revenge. In a way, the hate felt good. You were righteous, godlike, the dispenser of justice. Hate dispelled your fears and forged every disappointment, setback, loss, humiliation, and failure that ever happened to you into one massive steel sledgehammer of rage, poised to obliterate, and for one brief, purifying moment, give you relief. ~ Joe Ide

Thankfulness is far more than the key that tenderly and rather gracefully unshackles me from all that binds me. Rather, it is in fact the sledgehammer that shatters the shackles. And that's the best kind of key I can think of. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The versions of these stories that most people tell are indeed cute and sweet and incredibly, mind-numbingly, want-to-hit-yourself-in-the-head-with-a-sledgehammer-ingly-boring. ~ Adam Gidwitz

And his dick looks like a hot dog that got hit with a sledgehammer and sewn back together by a blind lady."
"Thanks, Port."
"You're welcome, D. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

I'd pushed her aside for so long that there was no foundation to build on. Just a mess of shattered pieces that I'd crushed with a sledgehammer every time she'd grown closer than I was comfortable with. ~ Nicole Jacquelyn

You are about as covert as a sledgehammer. ~ Gail Carriger

Who said it? – probably Confucius – "I can't beat a sculpture from a stone with a sledgehammer; I can't free the soul of man by violence." Peace was here, peace was now. Peace promised in any other time or place was a lie. ~ Denis Johnson

Why slap them on the wrist with feather when you can belt them over the head with a sledgehammer. ~ Katharine Hepburn

I'm sorry if I seem to digress, but that is precisely what I was thinking at the moment. It's the way my mind works. Things are not the same in real life as they are in, for instance, the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes. Brains, in reality, do not go clickety-clickety-clickety-click from A to B to C to D and so forth, rushing like a train along the rails, until at the end, with a happy "Toot-toot!" they arrive at their destination, Z, and the case is suddenly solved. Quite the contrary. In reality, analytical minds such as my own are forever shooting wildly off in all directions simultaneously. It's like joyously hitting jelly with a sledgehammer; like exploding galaxies; like a display of fireworks in which the pyrotechnic engineer has had a bit too much to drink and set off the whole conglobulation all at once, by accident. ~ Alan Bradley

Many operations involved intercepting and seizing someone traveling in a moving vehicle, often with bodyguards. The task force would surreptitiously attach a tracking beacon to the target's car. Delta was already experimenting with technologies that used an electromagnetic pulse to shut a car's battery down remotely. The unit also used a catapult net system that would ensnare car and driver alike. Once the car had been immobilized, operators would smash the window with a sledgehammer, pull their target through the window, and make off with him, shooting any bodyguards who posed a threat, while an outer security perimeter kept anyone who might interfere at bay. The operators had a name for these snatches: habeas grab-ass. ~ Sean Naylor

She turns her head, throws the damn thing with a strong flick, and it lands in the side of a wooden heron's head. Holy shit. I can't believe it. Lust bashes me like a sledgehammer, and I suddenly imagine her naked.
"Dude!" Blake yells, snapping me back to reality.
Anna stares down at me like she's conquered me. "You showed your colors!"
"Did not," I reply quickly. But even as I say it, I think I bleedin' well might've. ~ Wendy Higgins

Guilt wears track shoes. Sprint, marathon, or cross-country, it doesn't matter. It runs tireless to catch you, and it carries a sledgehammer. ~ Jamie Mason

Sometimes someone just takes a sledgehammer to your heart and even if you still have feelings for them, you can't ever quite feel the way you used to. The innocent part is all gone. ~ Melissa Senate

The only time I've tried to make plans, the cosmic sledgehammer has intervened and something else has happened. You just have to wait and see what comes your way, so that's what I do. ~ Peter Capaldi

You try to blunt certain emotions, but your tool isn't a scalpel, it's a sledgehammer. And you're blunting all of them. To protect yourself from feeling the horrible things, you prevent yourself from feeling some of the positive things. ~ Ariel Leve

However," Bob continued, and the word came down like a sledgehammer, "there is a line at which a likable bad boy becomes a nasty entitled bastard whom the public would rather see hung out to dry in the street than pay to watch prance about a stage in his bloomers. And when somebody starts abusing their fans, making an absolute arse of themselves in public places, and alienating the people who paid for their bloody Ferrari, they may consider that line crossed."

Lainie wondered if an actual "Hallelujah" chorus had appeared in the doorway, or if it was just the sound of her own glee.

She still had no idea why she was the privileged audience to this character assassination, but she warmly appreciated it. ~ Lucy Parker

When you get real stage fright, it comes like a sledgehammer out of the blue in the middle of something that you know you've done too many times before, and there's no rhyme or reason for it. It's something quite different from being nervous. It's almost paralysing. ~ Billie Whitelaw

I am so alone, all the time, even when I'm surrounded by people. Sometimes I get really tired of the walls, and I wish I had the strength to just go at them with a sledgehammer. ~ Karole Cozzo

It hit her like a sledgehammer, and it was then that she knew what to feel. A liquid trail of hate flooded her chest.
Knowing that she would hate him long and well filled her with pleasant anticipation, like when you know you are going to fall in love with someone and you wait for the happy signs. Hating BoyBoy, she could get on with it, and have the safety, the thrill, the consistency of that hatred as long as she wanted or needed it to define and strengthen her or protect her from routine vulnerabilities. ~ Toni Morrison

If I can capture truth in its simplest form, beauty will follow like a sledgehammer. ~ Mark Twain

No hemming or hawing, no hinting or manipulation, no sledgehammer–subtlety may hold us back from claiming a climate of transparency and capturing an untainted and luminescent skyline, when the boldness of the truth is coming defiantly to the fore. ("Did not expect it would ever happen there" ) ~ Erik Pevernagie

Her knee caught him between the legs with pitiless accuracy, driving the wind from his chest, making him teeter for a breathless moment, then bringing him down like a sledgehammer to a house of cards. As he slid groaning to the carpet in that special, shooting agony that only a blow to the fruits can produce, it was little consolation that he had been right.
His Queen was quite evidently a woman of rare and fiery passion. ~ Joe Abercrombie

Liberals don't care. Their approach is to rip out society's foundations without asking if they serve any purpose. Why do we have immigration laws? What's with these borders? Why do we have the institution of marriage, anyway? What do we need standardized tests for? Hey, I like Keith Richards - why not make heroin legal? Let's take a sledgehammer to all these load-bearing walls and just see what happens! ~ Ann Coulter

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there. ~ Seamus Heaney

Rather than going after our walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them and smell them and get to know them well. We begin a process of acknowledging our aversions and our cravings. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to build the walls: What are the stories I tell myself? What repels me and what attracts me? We start to get curious about what's going on. ~ Pema Chodron

In Soviet thinking the concept of economy of force has little place. Whereas to an Englishman the taking of a sledgehammer to crack a nut is a wrong decision and a sign of mental immaturity ... in Russian eyes the cracking of nuts is clearly what sledgehammers are for. ~ Max Hastings