Ballast Quotes

#1. He is the only man she has ever loved, and he has dumped her like ballast. She needs to find an explanation that does not make her a fool and him an animal, but every thought of him is a knife turning in the wound love made.

Mark Haddon

#2. Having jettisoned all my ballast, I concentrated on escaping.

Walter Moers

#3. I think the low emotional moments happen for every author. This is the time to find a sturdy mental ballast & realize self-doubt storms pass--you know, the same way hurricanes do.

Rebecca Taylor

#4. Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.

Anne Lamott

#5. She is the swelling sail, trim rigging and bust sunlit deck of our matrimonial yacht. I am the low hull, with the invisible ballast and keel.

Alasdair Gray

#6. A vow imparts stability, ballast and firmness to one's character.

Mahatma Gandhi

#7. The mind must have for ballast the clear conception of duty, if it is not to fluctuate between levity and despair.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#8. Ignorance and prejudice are the ballast of our ship of state - however, ships without ballast are not seaworthy and cannot sail in the tempests, nor reach a safe harbor.

George Orwell

#9. The cigars are ballast, sweetheart. Sheer ballast. If he didn't have a cigar to hold on to, his feet would leave the ground. We'd never see our Zooey again.

J.D. Salinger

#10. No one knew exactly why the seals ate stones, but maybe, some thought, it was for ballast. Or to help digestion. Or to stave off hunger. Or, as Brown had written in the journal, 'maybe they're just weird.

Susan Casey

#11. But they all recognized the steady, no-nonsense influence Jack had had on Truman; he was the ballast to Truman's airy sails.

Melanie Benjamin

#12. They were little more than boys, and yet while they differed in race, in temperament, and in their understanding of love, they were united in this: The remnant of their boyhood was a ballast they wished to cut away.

Michael Chabon

#13. My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

George Santayana

#14. Put the ballast of biblical truth
in the belly of our little boats,
lest the crashing waves of calamity
of these changing times
cause us to capsize in the sea of trouble

John Piper

#15. Enthusiasms, like stimulants, are often affected by people with small mental ballast.

Minna Antrim

#16. 'Beauty Queen' is the weirdest, strangest, and most perfect play to do before 'Hedda Gabler', because there are so many similar issues for Maureen and Hedda. I had played leading ladies before but couldn't really hook into them. After 'An American Daughter' and 'Beauty Queen', I had all the ballast.

Kate Burton

#17. You can never make a ship go steady by propping it outside; you know there must be ballast within the ship to make it go steady. So there is nothing outside us that can keep our hearts in a steady, constant way, but grace within the soul.

Jeremiah Burroughs

#18. No point carrying useless ballast. It won't change a thing.

Joanne Harris

#19. Praise a fool, and slay him; for the canvas of his vanity is spread; His bark is shallow in the water, and a sudden gust shall sink it: Praise a wise man, and speed him on his way; for he carrieth the ballast of humility, And is glad when his course is cheered by the sympathy of brethren ashore.

Martin Farquhar Tupper

#20. Like a submarine ejecting ballast, he bobbed to the surface as another sense pulled his eyelids all the way open like roller blinds in the old cartoons.

Andrew Barrett

#21. The real trouble is that the pure Word of Jesus has been overlaid with so much human ballast - burdensome rules and regulations, false hopes and consolations - that it has become extremely difficult to make a genuine decision for Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#22. When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square ... the critics ... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert" ... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling ...

Kazimir Malevich

#23. For him to have understood me would have meant reorganizing his thinking ... giving up his intellectual ballast, and few people are willing to risk such a radical move.

Edward T. Hall

#24. Mrs. George Widener was met not by automobile but by a special train - consisting of a private Pullman, another car for ballast, and a locomotive.

Walter Lord

#25. The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective [propaganda] will be.

Adolf Hitler

#26. Hatred is the ballast of the rock which lies upon our necks and underfoot.

Maya Angelou

#27. There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.

James Russell Lowell

#28. People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present." "Maybe

Kim Stanley Robinson

#29. Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

Henry David Thoreau

#30. Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide.

Mark Twain

#31. Less judgment than wit is more sail than ballast.

William Penn

#32. Books provided much-needed ballast - something we both craved, amid the chaos and upheaval ...

Will Schwalbe

#33. Here we are in the century of information, that is to say the unformed. Every kind of literature will be journalistic, with a science for ballast.

Julien Torma

#34. It becomes necessary to learn how to clear the mind of all clouds, to free it of all useless ballast and debris by dismissing the burden of too much concern with material things.

Indra Devi

#35. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.

Samuel Beckett

#36. Help, then, is the ballast that keeps us steady, that recognizes where along the path are the dangers and pitfalls that can throw us off; hope tempers fear so we can recognize dangers and then bypass or endure them.

Jerome Groopman

#37. Wit gives an edge to sense, and recommends it extremely.

William Penn