The Blue Flannel Suit Quotes

Wait here." I ran back up to my room to grab his blue-and-black plaid flannel shirt, still in my possession. Back on the porch, I handed it over.

"My shirt. I forgot you had it."

"It's 'my' shirt. You need to go home tonight and sleep in it. I made the mistake of washing it and now it doesn't smell like you anymore."

He turned the shirt over and over in his hand, laughing and shaking his head.

"And I want it back first thing in the morning. You read me? ~ Emma Scott

Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Shirts. I thought all the time they were khaki, army issue khaki, until I saw they were of heavy Chinese silk or finest flannel because they made his face so brown his eyes so blue. Dalton Ames. It just missed gentility. Theatrical fixture. Just papier-mache, then touch. Oh. Asbestos. Not quite bronze. ~ William Faulkner

What first comes across our minds
About the stocky Mexican

Pushing a mower across the lawn
At 7 a.m. on a Saturday

As the roar of the cutter wakes us?
Let me take a guess.

Why do they have to come so damn early?
What do we make of his flannel

Shirt missing buttons at the cuffs,
Threadbare at the shoulders,

The grass stains around his knees,
The dirt like roadmaps to nowhere,

Between the wrinkles of his neck?
Let me take a shot. Dirty Mexican.

Would his appearance lead us to believe
He is a border jumper or wetback

Who hits the bar top with an empty shot glass
For the twelfth time then goes home

To kick his wife around like fallen grapefruit
Lying on the ground?

First, the stocky Mexican isn't mowing the lawn
At 7 a.m. on a Saturday.

He doesn't work weekends anymore ever since
He lost one-third of his route

To laborers willing to work for next to nothing.
Second, he knows better than to kneel

On the wet grass because, well, the knees
Of his pants will become grass-stained

And pants don't grow on trees, even here,
Close to Palm Springs.

Instead, after 25 years of the same blue collar work,
Two sons out and one going to college,

Rather than jail, and a small but modest savings
In case he loses the remaining two-thirds
John Olivares Espinoza

Brushing through my hair was usually bad enough after a shower. Letting it dry without brushing it was a terrible mistake. It was full of painful tangles, and I hadn't made much progress when the door at the end of the veranda opened and Ren walked out. I squeaked in alarm and hid behind my hair. Perfect, Kells.
He was still barefoot, but had on khaki pants and a sky-blue button-down shirt that matched his eyes. The effect was magnetic, and here I was in flannel pajamas with giant tumbleweed hair.
He sat across from me and said, "Good evening, Kells. Did you sleep well?"
"Uh, yes. Did you?"
He grinned a dazzling white smile and nodded his head slightly. "Are you having trouble?" he asked and watched my detangling progress with an amused expression.
"Nope. I've got it all under control."
I wanted to divert his attention away from my hair, so I said, "How's your back and your, um, arm, I guess it would be?"
He smiled. "They're completely fine. Thank you for asking."
"Ren, why aren't you wearing white? That's all I've ever seen you wear. Is it because your white shirt was torn?"
He responded, "No, I just wanted to wear something different. Actually, when I change to a tiger and back, my white clothes reappear. If I changed to a tiger now and then switch back to a man again, my current clothes would be replaced with my old white ones."
"Would they still be torn and bloody?"
"No. When I reappear, they're clean and whole again. ~ Colleen Houck

My only one!
In your last letter
"My head aches
my heart is stunned!"
you say.
"If they hang you,
if I lose you;"
you say;
"I can't live!"
You'll live my dearest wife,
like a black smoke in the wind my memory will vanish;
you'll live, the red-haired sister of my heart
at most one year it lasts
in the twentieth century
the grief of death..
Death
a dead body swinging on a rope.
My heart doesn't accept
such a death..
But
be sure that, my love,
if some pitiable gypsy's
hairy black spider like hand
slips the rope
around my neck,
to see the fear in my blue eyes
they'll look in vain
at Nâzım!

And I,
in the twilight of my last morning,
shall see my friends and you,
and carry only the grief
of an unfinished song
to the soil...
My wife!
Good hearted,
golden coloured,
with eyes sweeter than honey, my bee;
why did I write you
that they want to hang me,
the trial is in the first step
and they don't pluck like a turnip
the head of a man.
Come, forget them all.
These are so far away probabilities.
If you have some money
buy me a flannel underwear,
my sciatica is acting up.
And don't forget that always
there should be good thoughts in the mind
of a prisoner's wife. ~ Nâzım Hikmet Ran

The other night I took Jims with me for a walk down to the store. It was the first time he had ever been out so late at night, and when he saw the stars he exclaimed, 'Oh, Willa, see the big moon and all the little moons!' And last Wednesday morning, when he woke up, my little alarm clock had stopped because I had forgotten to wind it up. Jims bounded out of his crib and ran across to me, his face quite aghast above his little blue flannel pyjamas. 'The clock is dead,' he gasped, 'oh Willa, the clock is dead.' "One night he was quite angry with both Susan and me because we would not give him something he wanted very much. When he said his prayers he plumped down wrathfully, and when he came to the petition 'Make me a good boy' he tacked on emphatically, 'and please make Willa and Susan good, 'cause they're not.' "I ~ L.M. Montgomery

There was someone sitting in his room, over on that chair -
"Are you kidding me?" He exhaled a curse and rubbed the back of his brain. "Really? Are you fucking kidding me?"
Across the way, like some fucked-up scarecrow, a pair of blue jeans, that Nirvana concert T-shirt of the angel's, the flannel bullshit, and a set of Nikes had been stuffed with God only knew what. The head of the "Lassiter" was made out of a nylon bag that had had potatoes in it, and the black and yellow hair was a collection of knee-high business socks - probably Butch's - and Swiffer cleaning rags that had been safety pinned in place.
Around its neck? A handwritten sign that read: the boss was here. ~ J.R. Ward

They were furious. Did he not know he might catch cold? Why did he not answer their hail? It was no good his telling them he had not heard; they knew better; he had not got flannel ears--Why had he not waited for them? --What was a boat for? Was this a proper time to go a-swimmin? -- Did he think this was midsummer? Or Lammas? -- He was to see how cold he was, blue an trembling like a fucking jelly -- Would a new-joined ships boy have done such a wicked thing? No, sir, he would not. -- What would the skipper, what would Mr Pullings and Mr Babbington say, when they heard of his capers? -- As God loved them, they had never seen anything so foolish: he might strike them blind, else. -- Where had he left his intellectuals? Aboard the sloop? They dried him with handkerchiefs., dressed him by force, and rowed him quickly back to the Polychrest. He was to go below directly, turn in between blankets--no sheets, mind--with a pint of grog and have a good sweat. he was to go up the side now, like a Christian and nobody would notice. Plaice and Lakey were perhaps the strongest men in the ship, with arms like gorillas; they thrust him aboard and hurried him to his cabin without so much as by your leave, and left him there in the charge of his servant, with recommenations for his present care. ~ Patrick O'Brian

Ruby, what does the future look like?" Nico asked. "I can't picture it. I try all the time, but I can't imagine it. Jude said it looked like an open road just after a rainstorm."
I turned back toward the board, eyes tracing those eight letters, trying to take their power away; change them from a place, a name, to just another word. Certain memories trap you; you relive their thousand tiny details. The damp, cool spring air, swinging between snow flurries and light rain. The hum of the electric fence. The way Sam used to let out a small sigh each morning we left the cabin. I remembered the path to the Factory the way you never forgot the story behind a scar. The black mud would splatter over my shoes, momentarily hiding the numbers written there. 3285. Not a name.
You learned to look up, craning your neck back to gaze over the razor wire curled around the top of the fence. Otherwise, it was too easy to forget that there was a world beyond the rusting metal pen they'd thrown all of us animals into.
"I see it in colors," I said. "A deep blue, fading into golds and reds - like fire on a horizon. Afterlight. It's a sky that wants you to guess if the sun is about to rise or set."
Nico shook his head. "I think I like Jude's better."
"Me too," I said softly. "Me too. ~ Alexandra Bracken

The setting sun had turned the blue sky a brilliant orange, then soft pink merging to pearl; the plum velvet of night had come out of the east, spangled with stars. ~ Paul Gallico

At these times, the things that troubled her seemed far away and unimportant: all that mattered was the hum of the bees and the chirp of birdsong, the way the sun gleamed on the edge of a blue wildflower, the distant bleat and clink of grazing goats. ~ Alison Croggon

My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted for so short a time, she went down again so soon, that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the utmost pain; for it heralded the moment which was to follow it, when she would have left me and gone downstairs again. ~ Marcel Proust

Mina penned the jubilant words into her blue spiral notebook with her favorite ballpoint pen. She faithfully used the same pen when writing all of her entries in the hope that ~ Chanda Hahn

Dangerous was the first word to come to mind as she held the blue eyes of the kitten holder. "I'm more likely to hurt you than these." He told her, voice like a train wreckage. All rust and granite. ~ V. Theia

John McEnroe ... was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived-the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a blue polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad. ~ David Foster Wallace

Here dwells a snake, one thousand miles long
Coiled, one thousand miles deep
Eyes like candy, it has eyes like candy
Hard and blue, but soft as kittens feet
Out of sight or in the element of light
It could be a devil, it could be an angel
With spiders inside a vision from hell
Its spine is a vertical scream
Slow as concrete, blurred as a dream
Fueled by inertia, depth, radius, and velocity,
Its soul
a twisted wreckage of despair and pain
And the spiders inside are just praying for rain
Killing time killing time
And praying for rain
One thousand miles deep ~ James O'Barr

Tears swam in her sky blue eyes and his heart squeezed down like a vise. It took every ounce of discipline he possessed not to press his palm over his chest.
"Damn it," he swore at her between clenched teeth. "Stop with the tears." She had to stop. He felt a little desperate.

-Airiana & Maxim ~ Christine Feehan

When sunlight, which contains red, yellow, green, and blue light, shines on a mud puddle with oil on it, the areas that strongly reflect each of those colors overlap and produce all kinds of combinations which our eyes see as different colors ... This phenomenon of colors produced by the partial reflection of white light by two surfaces is called iridescence, and can be found in many places ... the more you see how strangely Nature behaves, the harder it is to make a model that explains how even the simplest phenomena actually work. ~ Richard Feynman

Christopher Argent kept stealing disbelieving looks at Farah, his blue eyes reflecting the ambient glow like an alley cat's. Dorian understood why the man would dare in his presence.
First, because Christopher Argent was an unfeeling, fearless killer-for-hire.
And second, because most of the incarcerated men at Newgate had considered Dougan's Fairy some mythical creature, a sight too rare and beautiful to be beheld by a common man. Maybe even a fancy born of an imagination keen enough to take possession of the prison. To meet her was to gaze upon a fantasy realized, to remember the desperate yearnings of a lonely prisoner bereft of kindness, mercy, or beauty. To be blinded by the embodiment of all three of those things. For a man like Argent, one born to incarceration, the sight might have him reassessing some long-held cynical philosophies. ~ Kerrigan Byrne

She gasped again and opened blue eyes lit with erotic mischief. "Are you trying to steal the reins from me?"
Even with his penis buried deep within her, even moments from climax, he arched an eyebrow. "You have them only by my permission. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

Things were pretty cold-blooded back in Rockdale.
That's when my arms were so pretty I could hold them up to the light and see the veins curling all clean and smooth like little blue branches. ~ Adam Rapp

So do we get our happily ever after now?" I ask. He kneels down in front of me and grabs my hands and kisses the tops of them. "Yes, our version of happily ever after," he answers with sparkling blue eyes. "The version with whips and cuffs, right?" I ask. "That's the only kind of happily ever after I want, love. ~ Ella Dominguez

I started to take care of my body after I turned 50. I never liked how I looked physically because I was too cute, short, with coloring only on my cheeks, the perfect little nose, and then the blue eyes. But I would have preferred to have the look of a tough guy from the wrong side of town - one of those fascinatingly ugly looks. ~ Giorgio Armani

This is you. She pointed at the stick figure with enormous red curly marks and blue eyes.
Did my hair really look like that? I ran a hand over my head, feeling a bit like Little Orphan Annie. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Nike used to be known as Blue Ribbon Sports. What's now Sara Lee used to be Consolidated Foods. And Exxon was once Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. These were name changes that worked. But for all the ones that do, there are 10 or 20 that don't. ~ James Surowiecki

I move like I'm gravity, like it's not a decision.
Standing on my toes, on the edge of the high dive, the water looks as clear and blue as the sky.
In my head there's the possibility that this moment isn't here yet, that maybe I'm not born. I could be an idea. Or I could be realized, and life is standing still. For this moment, the world has stopped.
I have a perfect balance. The wind moves around me. My heart is as light and bright as the sun. I am as light as a sparrow bone, and for one moment I am everything that can't be caught and held.
Then I'm passing through the air, turning, arms drawn in, toes pointed. My chin rests on my chest. I believe I have a chance at anything: one full revolution.
I spread my wings. I arch my back. I remember why swans are graceful, why someone would name this for something beautiful.
I think I'm touching the clouds. For a long time they keep me from breaking the blue. I don't hear the shattering surface. I belong behind this sky, all-silent and calm, and part of the world where butterflies live after they give up their feet and dream of flight. I can stay, if I pretend the fire in my chest doesn't burn, if I pretend the world is upside down, if I pretend water is the air I breathe. ~ Suzanne Marie Phillips

I adore that pink, it is the navy blue of India! ~ Diana Vreeland

Virgil had read once that Grandma Moses was a primitive painter because she thought snow was white. The writer said if you really looked at it, snow was hardly ever white. It mostly was a gentler version of the color of the sky - blue, gray, orange in the evenings and mornings, often with purple shadows. When he looked, sure enough, the guy was right, and Grandma Moses had her head up her ass. ~ John Sandford

The Blue Dogs are a group of conservative Democrats in the House of Representatives. ~ Jim Matheson

ONCE I STOOD on the bank of a rice paddy in rural Sichuan Province, and a lean and aging Chinese peasant, wearing a faded forty-year-old blue jacket issued by the Mao government in the early years of the Revolution, stood knee deep in water and apropos of absolutely nothing shouted defiantly at me, We Chinese invented many things! ~ Mark Kurlansky

At one point, Joylene (a large woman from HR with four framed photos of her cats and one of her deceased father holding a trout on her desk) actually stated, "Ooo, I love Excel." Who says, "Ooo, I love Excel."? How is it even a sentence? Each time Joylene had a question, she waved her pen, with a huge rainbow colored feather taped to the end, above her head while making excited "uh, uh, um, uh" noises. "Yes, Joylene?" "If I want my columns color coded, am I able to mix my own preferred range of blues from a palette or do I have to select from the four-thousand shades of blue it already has?" "And that, your Honor, is when the defendant leapt across the desk. I enter into evidence the rainbow feather pen." If there ever comes a time where I'm typing numbers into boxes and decide I'd really like those boxes with numbers to be a specific shade of blue, it will be time to turn off the computer, pack my things, and start a fire. ~ David Thorne

Dee's natural colouring looks like an American landscape - country-sky-blue eyes and hair the colour of Tennessee wheat fields, golden strands with darker undertones. My hair is nearly black, and I have jealous green eyes.

In a fairytale she'd play the good fairy. I'd be the evil witch's screwup second cousin. ~ Emery Lord

I don't want you to ever see him again."
Indignant, Blue cried, "Whatever happened to 'children should never be given orders'?"
"That was before Gansey."<...>"This is the same as me telling you not to walk in front of a bus. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

It was the time when the field mice ventured out, after the hawks had settled in the trees but before the owls came to hunt. The sky was now the color Elv liked best - a tender dark blue, falling to earth like ashes. ~ Alice Hoffman

I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's 'Dream') at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of aromatic perfume. ~ Marcel Proust

Life is filled with suffering, but it is also filled with many wonders, like the blue sky, the sunshine, the eyes of a baby. To suffer is not enough. We must also be in touch with the wonders of life. They are within us and all around us, everywhere, any time. ~ Nhat Hanh

Zet and Lottie swam into New York City from the skies - that was how it felt in the Pacemaker, rushing along the Hudson at sunrise. First many blue twigs overhanging the water, than a rosy color, and then the heavy flashing of the river under the morning sun. They were in the dining car, their eyes were heavy. They were drained by a night of broken sleep in the day coach, and they were dazzled. They drank coffee from cups as heavy as soapstone, and poured from New York Central pewter. They were in the East, where everything was better, where objects were different. Here there was deeper meaning in the air.

After changing at Harmon to an electric locomotive, they began a more quick and eager ride. Trees, water, sky, and the sky raced off, floating, and there came bridges, structures, and at last the tunnel, where the air breaks gasped and the streamliner was checked. There were yellow bulbs in wire mesh, and subterranean air came through the vents. The doors opened, the passengers, pulling their clothing straight, flowed out and got their luggage, and Zet and Lottie, reaching Forty-second Street, refugees from arid and inhibited Chicago, from Emptyland, embraced at the curb and kissed each other repeatedly on the mouth. They had come to the World City, where all behavior was deeper and more resonant, where they could freely be themselves, as demonstrative as they liked. Intellect, art, the transcendent, needed no excuses here. Any cabdriver understood, Zet believed ~ Saul Bellow

My experience growing up in a rough and tumble town in the blue-collar world of Western Pennsylvania in the 1970s was that anything a man did was always more important than anything a woman did. ~ Tawni O'Dell

They wouldn't know mad when they saw it in any case, because a good portion of the women in the Asylum were no madder than the Queen of England. Many were sane enough when sober, as their madness came out of a bottle, which is a kind I knew very well. One of them was in there to get away from her husband, who beat her black and blue, he was the mad one but nobody would lock him up; ~ Margaret Atwood

Matthew sighed as he set the bottle on the mantel. "You know what they say," he said, as he and James left the room and began to wend their way back toward the party. "Drink, and you will sleep; sleep, and you will not sin; do not sin, and you will be saved; therefore, drink and be saved."
"Matthew, you could sin in your sleep," said a languorous voice.
"Anna," said Matthew, sagging against James's shoulder. "Have you been sent to fetch us?"
Lounging against the wall was James's cousin Anna Lightwood, gorgeously dressed in fitted trousers and a pin-striped shirt. She had the Herondale blue eyes, always disconcerting for James to see, as it felt a bit as if his father were looking at him. "If by 'fetch,' you mean 'drag you back to the ballroom by any means possible,'  " Anna said. "There are girls who need someone to dance with them and tell them they look pretty, and I cannot do it all on my own."
The musicians in the ballroom suddenly struck up a tune - a lively waltz.
"Crikey, not waltzing," said Matthew, in despair. "I loathe waltzing."
He began to back away. Anna seized him by the back of the coat. "Oh, no, you don't," she said, and firmly herded both of them toward the ballroom. ~ Cassandra Clare

After I left the White House, I kept a foothold in the business of American politics; as a talk-show host, analyst, commentator, speechmaker, and occasional writer. I was no longer a practitioner, but I was still a partisan, a Democrat, a blue-stater through and through. ~ Dee Dee Myers

Gruffly, he cleared his throat. 'Don't take this as a blanket approval of your tactics, Sarah, but if I'm ever unfortunate enough to get in trouble with the law, I want you to represent me.'

Before I could respond to this startling and totally out-of-the-blue compliment, he opened the door and was nudging me inside. I caught a quick glance of his face before he walked off toward the dining room. He was actually blushing! ~ Shirley Tallman

The trees were still green, the sky still blue, which counted for something. So they went ahead and plugged their smelly paradise - God's Own Country they called it in their brochures - because they knew, those clever Hotel People, that smelliness, like other peoples' poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to. A question of discipline. Of Rigor and Air-conditioning. Nothing more. ~ Arundhati Roy

I love the ocean. I've always liked the blue, so tranquil and peaceful and gliding. And the fear of it. ~ Siouxsie Sioux

A butterfly fluttered from flower to flower in the old garden, gracing the silvery-blue tips of the crocuses and what remained of the icy-white petals of the lady's prized tulips. The yellow strands on the butterfly's wings shimmered in the fading light, and Libby watched the creature in its journey, mesmerized by the graceful rise and fall of its dance.
Her arms outstretched, Libby twirled around like she had as a girl, embracing the last rays of sunlight. Here in this garden, she was as free as the butterfly. Here she didn't have to hide.
The butterfly climbed above the flowers and soared toward the lily pond. Beyond the pond were more flowers, hundreds of them, and then the trees.
Soon the butterfly would curl up under a rock or leaf and rest for the night, hiding in the darkness, alone and vulnerable until the sun powered her wings again at dawn.
Libby trailed the creature around the pond to see where it would land. If the night stayed warm, she might curl up beside the butterfly to rest, but not now. She no longer had to hide in these gardens.
Soon the moonlight would glaze the paths with gold, and she would explore for hours, enveloped in the shadows and the light. ~ Melanie Dobson