Steel Trap Quotes

For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive. ~ Frances Farmer

O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie
O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,
gimme a break before I die:
grant me wisdom, will, & wit,
purity, probity, pluck, & grit.
Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, kind,
gimme great abs & a steel-trap mind,
and forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice
these little blessings would suffice
to beget an earthly paradise:
make the bad people good
and the good people nice;
and before our world goes over the brink,
teach the believers how to think. ~ Philip Appleman

Please, Jonas. Men got brute strength and size. Women got hot bodies and steel-trap minds. It's our leg up in your little male-dominated society. ~ Jackson Pearce

STARS

Here in my head, language
keeps making its tiny noises.

How can I hope to be friends
with the hard white stars

whose flaring ad hissing are not speech
but a pure radiance?

How can I hope to be friends
with the yawning spaces between them

where nothing, ever, is spoken?
Tonight, at the edge of the field,

I stood up very still, and looked up,
and tried to be empty of words.

What joy was it, that almost found me?
What amiable peace?

Then it was over, the wind
roused up in the oak trees behind me

and I fell back, easily.
Earth has a hundred thousand pure contraltos-

even the distant night bird
as it talks threat, as it talks love

over the cold, black fields.
Once, deep in the woods,

I found the skull of a bear
and it was utterly silent-

and once a river otter, in a steel trap,
and it too was utterly silent.

What can we do
but keep breathing in and out,

modest and willing, and in our places?
Listen, listen, I'm forever saying,

Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof,
to the mockingbird, to the jack-in-the-pulpit-

then I come up with a few words, like a gift.
Even as now.

Even as the darkness has remained the pure, deep darkness.
Even as the stars have ~ Mary Oliver

I have this kind of mild nice-guy exterior, but inside my heart is like a steel trap. ~ Dan Aykroyd

Say that Finnegan Lane was something of a womanizer was like telling someone that it was a little steamy in the South in the summertime. Old, young, fat, thin, blonde, brunette, bald, toothless, face like a steel trap, Finn didn't care as long as it was breathing, female, and had the breasts to prove it. He wasn't even particular about how perky they were. ~ Jennifer Estep

Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap. ~ Florence King

Precollege program orientation was scheduled for two days after Watson arrived, and I discovered a few things in the meantime.
1. My uncle Leander has a memory like a steel trap. He took Watson and I to the all-you-can-eat Indian buffet around the corner from our flat, to the antiquarian bookshop to look at first editions of Faulkner, to the teahouse painted to look like a starry night, all of which Watson had mentioned in passing that he loved, and whose repetition now left Watson in a state of expansive joy.
2. I should have found this delightful. I did not. As, throughout all of this, Leander referred to Watson as my boyfriend.
2b. Loudly.
2c. He did this as often as he could.
2d. To wit: "A latte for my niece and her young man"; "Charlotte, wasn't that your Jamie's favorite, A Light in August? Faulkner's later work -"; "Child, go and get your boyfriend another napkin, we aren't barbarians/" And then that smile Leander had, something like a wolf after eating a fat peasant child. ~ Brittany Cavallaro

How confusing. Could it be that our narrator is unreliable? No such chance. Mind like a steel trap, I have. ~ Daniel Handler

Sometimes, to escape a bad relationship and reclaim our lives, we have to break a piece of our heart off, like a wolf chews its leg off to escape a steel trap. ~ Bryant McGill

Her life, she realized, had all the charm of a steel trap. ~ Anna Godbersen

Many years ago, I was in a Broadway show and I had to wear a fox fur around my shoulders. One day my hand touched one of the fox's legs. It seemed to be in two pieces. Then it dawned on me ... her leg had probally been snapped in two by the steel trap that had caught it. ~ Bea Arthur

She was smart and terribly determined, this girl-her will was pure steel, through and through-but she was as human as anyone else. She was lonely, too. Lonely in a way that perhaps only single girls fresh from small Midwestern towns know. Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly ... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness- the ache of the uprooted plant. ~ Stephen King

I only want to remind you what weak creatures human beings are. Even people who seem to have wills of steel have serious weaknesses! At those moments of weakness, will power breaks into a thousand pieces. ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I am waiting on a trap door, but things might fall through for me. ~ Jarod Kintz

Every factory must be a school to educate, like Che Guevara said, to produce not only briquettes, steel, and aluminum, but also, above all, the new man and woman, the new society, the socialist society. ~ Hugo Chavez

Nothing is irreversible except
dying. ~ Danielle Steel

Where was that fragile, golden-fair Dresden doll I used to be? Gone.
Gone like porcelain turned into steel-made into someone who would
always get what she wanted, no matter who or what stood in her way. ~ V.C. Andrews

He never falls into the trap of the word "freedom". ~ Paulo Coelho

Sun-brushed hands trailed circles on his wings, opening new ways to touch the sky. The dance is the dalliance of the whispers, unsaid desires brighter than eternal suns. His teeth of flint and steel, the sun boy's lips like ichor. ~ Grace Curley

I strongly believe that for the steel prices to be market-driven, without distortions, we need to substantially increase the production capacity. ~ Jitin Prasada

Feelings trap us in the self, Tony dear. Doing a thing because you feel wonderful about it - even a work of charity - is in the end a selfish act. We perform the work not to feel wonderful but to know and love the other. It's the same with your romance. You may not feel your love, but God is still your loved one, your other. ~ Tony Hendra

Like the rabbi with the red circle, she should have said "no" to everything. She should have become a raven. She didn't understand that every word the judge said was a trap, in that every word she said could easily be a stone used to shut her into that trap. ~ Alice Hoffman

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well. Treason has done his worst. Nor steel nor poison, malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing can touch him further. ~ William Shakespeare

The men in the steel industry who sacrificed their all were nor merely aiding their fellows at home but were adding strength to the cause of their comrades in all industry. ~ John L. Lewis

I'm like him," she'd whispered.

"You're not," Wren said.

"I am. I'm crazy like him." She was already having panic attacks. She was already hiding at parties. In seventh grade, she'd been late to class for the first two weeks because she couldn't stand being in the halls with everyone else during passing periods. "It's probably going to get worse in a few years. That's when it usually kicks in."

"You're not," Wren said.

"But what if I am?"

"Decide not to be."

"That's not how it works," Cath argued.

"Nobody knows how it works."

"What if I don't even see it coming."

"I'll see it coming."

Cath tried to stop crying, but she'd been crying so long, the crying had taken over, making her bvreathe in harsh sniffs and jerks.

"If it takes you," Wren said. "I won't let go."

A few months later, Cath gave that line to Simon in a scene about Baz's bloodlust. Wren was still writing with Cath back then, and when she got to the line, she snorted.

"I'm here for you if you go manic," Wren said. "But you're on your own if you become a vampire."

"What good are you anyway," Cath said. Their dad was home by then. And better. And Cath didn't feel, for the moment, like her DNA was a trap ready to snap closed on her.

"Apparently, I'm good for something," Wren said. "You keep stealing all my best lines. ~ Rainbow Rowell

The crumbs blow free down the pointless sea
To the beat of a cakey heart
And the sensitive steel of the knife can feel
That love is a race apart
In the speed of the lingering light are blown
The crumbs to the hake above,
And the tropical air vibrates to the drone
Of a cake in the throes of love. ~ Mervyn Peake

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. ~ Charles Dickens

To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do - to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst - is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still. The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed ~ Frederick Buechner

It's a small town, it has only a few docks ... now they are in a trap. ~ Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

My mother felt we'd be earning a living during our entire adult lives, and therefore believed we should spend summers in learning activities. Consequently, I got to see a plate glass factory in Pittsburgh, a U.S. Steel plant, and how Heinz made ketchup. ~ Patricia A. Woertz

Book Power

Books feed and cure and
chortle and collide.

In all this willful world
of thud and thump and thunder
man's relevance to books
continues to declare.

Books are meat and medicine
and flame and flight and flower,
steel, stitch, and cloud and clout,
and drumbeats in the air. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

I always try to write about believable people. ~ Danielle Steel

He was gone, and she was broken hearted, that was all that mattered. ~ Danielle Steel

Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state. ~ Gore Vidal

The scarcity trap captures this notion we see again and again in many domains. When people have very little, they undertake behaviors that maintain or reinforce their future disadvantage. If you have very little, you often behave in such a way so that you'll have little in the future. ~ Sendhil Mullainathan

It is a dangerous trap to believe that our search is over because we have gained all the riches we are going to have. ~ Eric Samuel Timm

They trap us like that - babies- with one look they can take hold of our hearts because our hearts have no defences against such beauty and fragility. ~ Michael Robotham

I don't like broad swords. They're not much fun. A broad sword is just a big chunk of steel, and there's not much finesse in it, not much skill, I don't think anyway. ~ Sean Bean

Luckily I haven't fallen into the trap, which has claimed so many writers, of living from day to day thinking 'Ah, I'll write a book about that.' ~ Amelie Nothomb

Like all men with a faculty that surpasses human requirements, his father was very nervous. Then, too, he was sentimental, and, like most sentimental people, he was both cruel and abused. Also, he had much bad luck, and it was not all of it his own. He had died in a trap that he had helped only a little to set, and they had all betrayed him in their various ways before he died. All sentimental people are betrayed so many times. Nick could not write about him yet, although he would, later, ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Jeffrey Pfeffer and I found that many ineffective companies suffer from this disease, which we call the "smart talk trap."17 This a syndrome where companies hire, reward, and promote people for sounding smart rather than making sure that smart things are done. In such organizations, talking somehow becomes an acceptable - even a preferred - substitute for actually doing anything. Inaction is bad for any company. But it is especially devastating when innovation is the goal, because so many ideas need to be tried to find a few that might work. ~ Robert I. Sutton

Tires. Drums. Steel cages.
Your place is like Disneyland! ~ Geonard Yleana

People fall so in love with their pain, they can't leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Her mother had told her the mortal world was pocked with memorials and monuments to loss. They build with steel and stone and promise to remember, she'd said. But they never do. ~ Leigh Bardugo

If John had been paying close attention to Lester's face, he would have seen him go white, the way men do when they see a trap swinging shut on them. ~ Douglas Wilson

That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind [...] I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this - that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes - pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts - all of them fixed and inviolable., and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forger work or welding sees "steel" as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not. Shapes, like this tappet, are what you arrive at, what you give to the steel. Steel has no more shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine here. These shapes are all of someone's mind. That's important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone's mind. There's no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel. There's nothing else there. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

MARLYS WAS A WOMAN of ordinary appearance, if seen in a supermarket or a library, dressed in homemade or Walmart dresses or slacks, a little too heavy, but fighting it, white-haired, ruddy-faced. In her heart, though, she housed a rage that knew no bounds. The rage fully possessed her at times, and she might be seen sitting in her truck at a stoplight, pounding the steering wheel with the palms of her hands, or walking through the noodle aisle at the supermarket with a teeth-baring snarl. She had frightened strangers, who might look at her and catch the flames of rage, quickly extinguished when Marlys realized she was being watched. The rage was social and political and occasionally personal, based on her hatred of obvious injustice, the crushing of the small and helpless by the steel wheels of American plutocracy. ~ John Sandford

Fathers…it's vital to exhibit a thoughtful balance between being a tough as nails disciplinarian and compassionate gentle patriarch to our families. Too much of one devastates relationships and too much of the other emasculates our ability to effectively lead. Our wives and children need the security and assurance of knowing that we can be both tough and tender. One side steel…the other side velvet. ~Jason Versey ~ Jason Versey

grappling in a hernia truss with steel kegs of Yuengling. For ~ Michael Chabon

Potential to increase the lifetime value of the customer. Usually marketing departments assume that the lifetime value of a customer is fixed when doing their ROI calculations. We view the lifetime value of a customer to be a moving target that can increase if we can create more and more positive emotional associations with our brand through every interaction that a person has with us. Another common trap that many marketers fall into is focusing too much on trying to figure out how to generate a lot of buzz, when really they should be focused on building engagement and trust. I can tell you that my mom has zero buzz, but when she says something, I listen. To that end, most of our efforts on the customer service and customer experience side actually happen after we've already made the sale and taken a customer's credit card number. ~ Tony Hsieh

Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me. Like tall
And painless guillotines they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed - you call
It wonderful; I call it crass. ~ John Updike

If you wait until all of your own issues are gone before helping others, it will never happen. This is a trap that millions have fallen into, not realizing that our own sanctification happens as we minister to others. ~ Francis Chan

I still have my first 'Black Lightning' that I got way back in the day, and my first 'Steel.' And I proudly display those comics, by the way. I have a lot of comics, but those are among the ones that mean the most to me. ~ John Ridley