Spokes Quotes

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men. ~ William Empson

The women that I picked spoke sweet and low
And yet gave tongue. "Hound voices" were they all. ~ William Butler Yeats

Endless longing; a face you'd known since childhood, since birth almost; a body that moved as though it were your own. These were things you never spoke of, things you never hoped for; things you could never admit to. Things you'd die for, and die of. ~ Elizabeth Hand

I actually spoke in an African-American church yesterday. ~ Howard Dean

Was not this ... what we spoke of as the great advantage of wisdom
to know what is known and what is unknown to us? ~ Plato

They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends. ~ Thomas Hardy

All of us are displaced. Few people live where their great-grandparents lived or speak the language their great-grandparents spoke. ~ Hephzibah Menuhin

Spintharus, speaking in commendation of Epaminondas, says he scarce ever met with any man who knew more and spoke less. ~ Plutarch

The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand. ~ E.L. Doctorow

If you just breathe, and go slower, you will have enough energy. It's really important because there are people who wait in line, and your work has changed their lives. You will need to listen to them because they are also going to feed you and give you confirmation of the prayer you asked before you spoke. ~ Sandra Cisneros

Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload. ~ Richard Saul Wurman

True belief and true repentance are twins: it would be idle to attempt to say which is born first. All the spokes of a wheel move at once when the wheel moves, and so all the graces commence action when regeneration is wrought by the Holy Ghost. Repentance, however, there must be. ~ Charles Spurgeon

The economic part is the one that came out first because there were some problems about which the press spoke a lot. ~ Pope Francis

The thirty spokes unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends. ~ Lao-Tzu

Needless to say, the fact that he actually spoke to me at all practically caused me to pass out. And then the fact that he was actually saying something that sounded like it might be a prelude to asking me out - well, I nearly threw up. I mean it. I felt really sick, but in a good way. ~ Meg Cabot

I grew up in a very literate, very independent household where people spoke their ideas and were very supportive of helping each other find their own way. ~ Lucinda Williams

She felt him tremble with the force of his need. He spoke just beneath her ear, his voice thick with tormented pleasure. You have to leave, Sara ... because I want to hold you like this until your skin melts into mine. I want you in my bed, the smell of you on my sheets, your hair spread across my pillow. I want to take your innocence. God! I want to ruin you for anyone else. ~ Lisa Kleypas

From purest wells of English undefiled None deeper drank than he, the New World's Child, Who in the language of their farm field spoke The wit and wisdom of New England folk. ~ John Greenleaf Whittier

Good people all, with one accord, Lament for Madam Blaize, Who never wanted a good word From those who spoke her praise. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

She spoke quietly then, the tiniest crack in her voice, and all at once Lacey Pemerton was not Lacey Pemberton. She was just - like, a person. ~ John Green

And this totally normal conversation unspools from there, covering the basics: family, siblings, school, favorite composers, favorite movies, favorite wood (for carving puppets), the prehistory of the sandwich, and whether the ancient Romans got their togas caught in the spokes of their unicycles ~ Laini Taylor

A plaster girl with intense glass eyes sat astride a bicycle pedaling at the maddest pace; though its wheel spokes spun hypnotically, the bicycle of course never budged: all that effort and the poor girl going nowhere. It was a pitifully human situation, and one that Sylvia could so exactly identify with herself that she always felt a real pang. ~ Truman Capote

Interestingly, God's remedy for Elijah's depression was not a refresher course in theology but food and sleep ... Before God spoke to him at all, Elijah was fed twice and given a good chance to sleep. Only then, and very gently, did God confront him with his error. This is always God's way. Having made us as human beings, He respects our humanness and treats us with integrity. That is, He treats us true to the truth of who we are. It is human beings and not God who have made spirituality impractical. ~ Os Guinness

The Lord had been very gracious, and spoke peace to me in the time of my distress, and I now most ungratefully turned again to folly; at times I felt sharp reproof, but I did not get low enough to cry for help. ~ John Woolman

Here's the real secret: you can fulfill the commands of the Bible better by falling in love with God than by trying to obey him. It's not that your obedience isn't significant or relevant; it's simply not the center of the wheel. No, the hub of your life is your relationship with God. Your behavior and obedience radiate like spokes from the center of your life and allow you to roll forward. When you try to make your eternal behavior the hub on which you turn, you get stuck. Forward motion must be fueled by love. ~ Chris Hodges

Jesus did not get stuck in intellectual arguments with people. He did not go for the intellect; He went for the conscience. He spoke to that part of the person that knows the difference between right and wrong instinctively. ~ Kirk Cameron

Because, as we are told - a sad old joke, too - Ghosts, like the ladies, never speak till spoke to. ~ Bill Vaughan

There are people nobody notices, but the world revolves around them. They're the quiet ones, the strong, peaceful ones, who form the unbreakable hub for a bunch of fragile spokes. True families aren't bred, they're spun together. And at their center, at the center of the infinite wheel of every family of every kind, blood or otherwise, there is a hub, that person, those people, who hold the wheel together and keep it turning. ~ Deborah Smith

An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness. ~ Sonia Sotomayor

We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw. ~ Wendell Berry

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel,
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheels depends.
We turn clay to make vessel,
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.
We pierce doors and windows to make a house,
And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.
Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not. ~ Lao-Tzu

It is true that despite occasional gleams of Churchillian eloquence he [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] usually spoke poorly. He was far more effective in conversations a deux. But those who dismiss him as shallow because his rhetoric was fustian err. ~ William Manchester

Education is fantastic. In my case I had to split my university course so it took a few more years. I really want to excel at everything I do, so I sat down and spoke with both my swimming coach and my tutor and we worked out a good plan to get the best out of both my swimming and my education. ~ Liam Tancock

We don't ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well. ~ Susan Cain

I then spoke to chancellor (Angela) Merkel of Germany and we agreed that the United States and our European allies will work closely together in the weeks and months ahead. ~ Barack Obama

When he spoke, the roughness was gone from his voice. I could tell you I did it. That's what you wanna hear. I could tell you she did it to herself, but both ways I'd be lying. It was you who did it, Lily. You didn't mean it, but it was you. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

Teaching I realized took up a lot of my time. I was a kind of a teacher that spent time with students, spoke to them after class, tried to help them out. I'd talk with them personally about their work and try to get out of them what they were thinking about, forcing them to thinking seriously and not just falling back on all the ideas that they had picked up someplace. And so I took my job teaching very seriously and that - as a result, it took up a lot of time. ~ Robert Barry

'Speak when you're spoken to!' The Queen sharply interrupted her. 'But if everybody obeyed that rule,' said Alice, who was always ready for a little argument, 'and if you only spoke when you were spoken to, and the other person always waited for you to begin, you see nobody would ever say anything, so that - ' 'Ridiculous!' cried the Queen. 'Why, don't you see, child - ' here she broke off with a frown, and, after thinking for a minute, suddenly changed the subject of the conversation. ~ Lewis Carroll

In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked ... ~ Harold Brodkey

In summer, most ramen restaurants in Tokyo serve hiyashi chūka, a cold ramen noodle salad topped with strips of ham, cucumber, and omelet; a tart sesame- or soy-based sauce; and sometimes other vegetables, like a tomato wedge or sheets of wakame seaweed. The vegetables are arranged in piles of parallel shreds radiating from the center to the edge of the plate like bicycle spokes, and you toss everything together before eating. It's bracing, ice-cold, addictive- summer food from the days before air conditioning.
In Oishinbo: Ramen and Gyōza, a young lifestyle reporter wants to write an article about hiyashi chūka. "I'm not interested in something like hiyashi chūka," says my alter ego Yamaoka. It's a fake Chinese dish made with cheap industrial ingredients, he explains.
Later, however, Yamaoka relents. "Cold noodles, cold soup, and cold toppings," he muses. "The idea of trying to make a good dish out of them is a valid one." Good point, jerk. He mills organic wheat into flour and hires a Chinese chef to make the noodles. He buys a farmyard chicken from an old woman to make the stock and seasons it with the finest Japanese vinegar, soy sauce, and sake. Yamaoka's mean old dad Kaibara Yūzan inevitably gets involved and makes an even better hiyashi chūka by substituting the finest Chinese vinegar, soy sauce, and rice wine.
When I first read this, I enjoyed trying to follow the heated argument over this dish I'd never even heard of. Yamaoka and Kaibara are in total a ~ Matthew Amster-Burton

Eastward the dawn rose, ridge behind ridge into the morning, and vanished out of eyesight into guess; it was no more than a glimmer blending with the hem of the sky, but it spoke to them, out of the memory and old tales, of the high and distant mountains. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I could never muster the courage to speak to girls in my college in Pune. Most of them were Parsis and spoke English. I came from a village and could barely converse in English. ~ Sharad Pawar

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I can remember crawling through the window where he was in the hospital ... He said, 'You have a gift ... keep training for me.' I s'pose those were the last words he ever spoke to me. ~ Dawn Fraser

When a man tells me God hath spoken in a dream, I know he dreamt that God spoke to him. ~ Thomas Hobbes

It thrilled through him when he first felt the keel answer to his hand on the spokes and slide over the long hollows as the foresail scythed back and forth against the blue sky. ~ Rudyard Kipling

The smog curled between the streetlamps and the spokes of the wrought iron framework. It seemed through your body and into your bones. ~ Sara Sheridan

He spoke so slowly, cobwebs could have formed between his words. ~ Scott Heim

Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract. ~ Ian McEwan

The kids growing up in the apartheid era were so restricted and angry - if they spoke out against it, they were thrown in jail. ~ Malik Bendjelloul

I would like to thank those who spoke boldly against the 'gay marriage float' in the 2014 Rose Parade. Apparently, that vigorous opposition came from perhaps millions of people, and it had a significant influence on how the matter was handled on network and cable television. ~ James Dobson

But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more. ~ Patrick O'Brian

John Lennon brought his wife Cynthia, a nice blonde girl and she was horribly put out of sight and stayed home. I know it broke John's heart John wasn't happy about it and she was
because we spoke on the plane. I photographed her and them on the plane coming over. And you know photographs don't lie. They tried putting on a black wig on her for a couple of days and that was the sad part that kept quiet because they wanted them to be like, you know, fresh- which they were ~ Harry Benson

He will be England captain one day. Jack Wilshere is a real leader. I saw how he spoke with the referee and the other players [against Denmark]. It is difficult to find someone so young with such a big personality. I remember two defenders, Paolo Maldini and Franco Baresi, and one attacker, Raul, but for personality and confidence on the pitch he is the best young midfielder I have seen for his age. ~ Fabio Capello

I think Stalin was afraid of Roosevelt. Whenever Roosevelt spoke, he sort of watched him with a certain awe. He was afraid of Roosevelt's influence in the world. ~ W. Averell Harriman

The Rolling Stones were an inkling towards an appreciation of the unity of music, dance and words. Any of the black R&B people who had a stage show that involved dancing, music and words did the same thing, except that I thought Jagger's words were good, his music was good and his dancing was good. I spoke to him about Blake and tried to get him to sing [William] Blake's The Grey Monk, to use his words as lyrics. He didn't do it. In the end, I did it myself. ~ Allen Ginsberg

If our family was an airline, Mom was the hub and we were the spokes. You rarely went anywhere nonstop; you went via Mom, who directed the traffic flow and determined the priorities: which family member was cleared for takeoff or landing. Even my father was not immune to Mom's scheduling, though he was given more leeway than the rest of us. ~ Will Schwalbe

The girl was lighter without her heart. She danced barefoot on the hot roads, and her feet were not cut by the glass or stones that studded her way. She spoke to the dead whenever they visited her. She tried to be kind, but they realised that they no longer had anything in common with her, and she realised it, too. So they went their separate ways. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

I suspect that Jesus spoke many of his parables as a kind of sad and holy joke and that that may be part of why he seemed reluctant to explain them because if you have to explain a joke, you might as well save your breath. ~ Frederick Buechner

Only the most unapologetic biblical fundamentalists, for instance, take every biblical injunction literally. If we all took all scripture at the same level of authority, then we would be more open to slavery, to the subjugation of women, to wider use of stoning. Jesus himself spoke out frequently against divorce in the strongest of terms. ~ Jon Meacham

The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw him into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as 'Sir' ~ George Orwell

My father spoke with his hands. He was deaf. His voice was in his hands. And his hands contained his memories. ~ Myron Uhlberg

I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too! I want to go too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going. ~ John Green

Justice Lewis Powell spoke for all of us when he said: Equal justice under law is perhaps the most inspiring idea of our society. It is one of the ends for which our entire legal system exists. ~ Edward Kennedy

If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled. ~ Jodi Picoult

Even God had a Welsh name : He spoke to him in the old language; He was to have a peculiar care For the Welsh people. History showed us He was too big to be nailed to the wall Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him Between the boards of a black book . ~ R.S. Thomas

Love wasn't the soft, silky words the poets spoke of. Love,with it's twin edges, was the one factor that weakened so many women, that pushed them to compromised their own wants, their own needs for the needs and wants of another. ~ Nora Roberts

It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,' says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of time, like the best, are always passing away. ~ Tony Wilson

Chesterton spoke of 'the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.' It would be hard to sum up liberalism for succinctly. ~ Joseph Sobran

I had the luck that my parents educated me in three languages. With my mother I spoke Dutch, with my father Italian, and in the school I learned German. But my host language is Italian. ~ Michelle Hunziker

For, as it is written in the book of the Prophets: 'And the angel that spoke in me, said to me ... ' He does not say, 'Spoke to me' but 'Spoke in me' ... ~ Saint Augustine

His pacing stopped. The mattress sighed as he sat on the edge. seconds ticked by before he spoke so softly she could barely hear. Sometimes I want to leave this town so bad I can taste it. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

For decades, our differences with Iran meant that our governments almost never spoke to each other. Ultimately, that did not advance America's interests. ~ Barack Obama

He spoke with more eloquence than wisdom. ~ Winston S. Churchill

She spoke and loosened from her bosom the embroidered girdle of many colors into which all her allurements were fashioned. In it was love and int desire which steals the mind even of the wise. ~ Homer

Between his eyes, there were four lines, the marks of such misery as children should never feel. He spoke with that wonderful whisky voice that so many Spanish children have, and he was a tough and entire little boy. ~ Martha Gellhorn

The more they talked and argued, the less they understood each other. In the end they fell silent, full of mutual contempt and hatred. And in this silence of the dumb and these speeches of the blind, in this medley of people bound together by the same grief, terror and hope, in this hatred and lack of understanding between men who spoke the same tongue, you could see much of the tragedy of the twentieth century. ~ Vasily Grossman

... a cheerful black shadow reared up behind him as he spoke, thundering a happy challenge to my Dark Passenger, which slid forward and bellowed back. ~ Jeff Lindsay

He very soon acquired the reputation of being the best public speaker of his time. He had taken pains to master the art, approaching it with scientific precision. On the morning of a day on which he was giving a speech, he once told Wilkie Collins, he would take a long walk during which he would establish the various headings to be dealt with. Then, in his mind's eye, he would arrange them as on a cart wheel, with himself as the hub and each heading a spoke. As he dealt with a subject, the relevant imaginary spoke would drop out. When there were no more spokes, the speech was at an end. Close observers of Dickens noticed that while he was speaking he would make a quick action of the finger at the end of each topic, as if he were knocking the spoke away. ~ Simon Callow

One of the miracles of the airplane is that it plunges a man directly into the heart of mystery. You are a biologist studying, through your porthole, the human ant-hill, scrutinizing objectively those towns seated in their plain at the centre of their highways which go off like the spokes of a wheel and, like arteries, nourish them with the quintessence of the fields. A needle trembles on your manometer, and this green clump below you becomes a universe. You are the prisoner of a greensward in a slumbering park. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

The Lord recently spoke a powerful word to me, 'No more delay!' This word has many applications, which the Lord led me to release as a series of prophetic decrees during Glory of Zion's recent Head of The Year Conference. ~ Dutch Sheets

Ye suffer from yourselves. None else compels,
None other holds you that ye live and die,
And whirl upon the wheel, and hug and kiss
Its spokes of agony,
Its tire of tears, its nave of nothingness. ~ Edwin Arnold

A driving snow-storm in the night and still raging; five or six inches deep on a level at 7 A.M. All birds are turned into snowbirds. Trees and houses have put on the aspect of winter. The traveller's carriage wheels, the farmer's wagon, are converted into white disks of snow through which the spokes hardly appear. But it is good now to stay in the house and read and write. We do not now go wandering all abroad and dissipated, but the imprisoning storm condenses our thoughts. I can hear the clock tick as not in pleasant weather. My life is enriched. I love to hear the wind howl. I have a fancy for sitting with my book or paper in some mean and apparently unfavorable place, in the kitchen, for instance, where the work is going on, rather a little cold than comfortable. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Jonah spoke what everyone was thinking. "Wouldn't it be Twilight Zone if the door was open, too?"
Hamilton tried the knob. It didn't budge.
Ian stepped forward and examined the lock. "Natalie's diary has better security than this." He produced a credit card and slipped it between the latch and the jamb. There was a click, and the door swung wide. ~ Gordon Korman

Feminism is not here to dictate to you. It's not prescriptive, it's not dogmatic. All we are here to do is give you a choice. If you want to run for President, you can. If you don't, that's wonderful, too. I'm lucky I was raised to believe that my opinion at the dinner table was valuable. My mum and I spoke as loudly as my brothers. ~ Emma Watson

I watched 'Rocky' and 'Raging Bull' and 'Taxi Driver' over and over again. They spoke to you, man. ~ Paddy Considine

Over on the Democratic side, Martin O'Malley recently spoke about the need for Wall Street reform and said that he isn't running for president to be quote, 'wined and dined' by executives. Then Chris Christie said, 'And I am also not running to be wined.' ~ Jimmy Fallon

Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room. ~ Anne Tyler

I was taken by William Burroughs' presence and intelligence from the first time I was introduced to him, by Lester Bangs in 1975. He was thrilling to listen to. When you heard him speak, you felt that you were privy to such a rare mind. Even in small-talk, he spoke with perfect economy of language. His shoots with me were very collaborative and it was an incredible opportunity to be able to photograph him over the course of twenty years. ~ Kate Simon

Thirty spokes share the hub of a wheel;
yet it is its center that makes it useful.
You can mould clay into a vessel;
yet, it is its emptiness that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows from the walls of a house;
but the ultimate use of the house
will depend on that part where nothing exists.
Therefore, something is shaped into what is;
but its usefulness comes from what is not. ~ Lao-Tzu

Anyone who ever spoke to me would know I would never say the words 'get hitched' nxt time do ur research. ~ Lady Starlight

Music springs from and is replenished by a hidden source which lies outside the world or reality. Music ever spoke to me of a mysterious world beyond, which moved my heart deeply and eloquently intimated its transcendental nature. ~ Bruno Walter

The story about me, apocryphal or not, is that I could sing before I spoke. My parents went into bedroom one day and there I was standing in the crib singing God Bless America. ~ Linda Lavin

My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name. ~ Jack Ma

Birth, coupling, death. The more she thinks about it, the more it seems that that is all there is: a wheel turning over and over, moving so fast that sometimes you cannot even make out the spokes. It is a wonder there is any room for poetry. ~ Sarah Dunant

It's amazing when you get to a certain age, and you talk about sleep in the same way you spoke about getting inebriated ... I got eight hours last night. It was fantastic! ~ Johnny Depp

I became a chameleon. My color didn't change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn't look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you. ~ Trevor Noah

By the time I got to high school, I didn't play anything but baseball because I was on a mission. I really wanted to get a scholarship. I really wanted to focus all my time and efforts on baseball. When I got up to Florida State, God spoke to me very clearly and called me out of that and called me into music, which up until that point had just been a hobby. ~ Jonny Diaz

He [Ryan white] spoke to me that my life was out of order. My life was a mess. I had no values anymore. And he was so stoic with his infection. He wasn't bitter. He wasn't angry. He just was a kid. He wanted to go to school and play football, drive his car. And he had no bitterness about him. ~ Elton John

If I never spoke of hell, I should think I had kept back something that was profitable, and should look on myself as an accomplice of the devil. ~ J.C. Ryle