Footed Quotes

#1. Imagination took the reins, and reason, slow-paced, though sure-footed, was unequal to a race with so eccentric and flighty a companion.

Fanny Burney

#2. King Henry wants lands an'titles, like all the English."
"What do Scots want?" she asked, glancing over her shoulder. Darrow was far more sure footed than she was.
"A good woman, a warm bed, and food in their bellies." He grinned at her and she couldn't help but laugh.

Selena Kitt

#3. Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don't get all writerly: 'He opened the door.' There, it's open.

Amy Hempel

#4. Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.'
William Boot

Evelyn Waugh

#5. Old men, what are they? Fast fading the leaf, Three-footed they walk, yet frail as a child, As a dream set afloat in the daylight.

Aeschylus

#6. Just as ballroom dancing and pair skating command partners to work together seamlessly, in the sport of dressage, the rider performers an intricate pas de deux with his partner - a twelve-hundred-pound four-footed beast.

Elizabeth Letts

#7. A parentologist is a person who writes a book about parenting that is very clear about answers to, 'How am I supposed to raise my child?' Some of these well-intentioned people may be a bit too sure-footed on the sometimes slippery slope of parenting.

Clyde Edgerton

#8. Cats are cats ... the world over!
These intelligent, peace-loving, four-footed friends- who are without prejudice, without hate, without greed- may someday teach us something.
-James Mackintosh Qwilleran

Lilian Jackson Braun

#9. She is not what I envied in high school, the popular girl. She is something I'm not even sure existed then, the sure-footed girl. She gives the impression of being completely herself, and only a part of that impression is false.

Anna Quindlen

#10. He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer.

William Butler Yeats

#11. A vi'let on the meadow grew, That no one saw, that no one knew, It was a modest flower. A shepherdess pass'd by that way
Light footed, pretty and so gay; That way she came, Softly warbling forth her lay.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#12. One can remain more sure-footed by taking small steps, but perhaps achieve greater speed by taking bigger steps. Of course, one also runs the risk of setting out in a completely erroneous direction. Surely the important thing isn't the length of our steps, but that the objective is clear.

Angela Merkel

#13. I was this flat-chested, big-footed, lanky thing.

Lauren Bacall

#14. If only the good were a little less heavy-footed

W. Somerset Maugham

#15. Death is not soft-mouthed, vague-footed, nearby. It is in the hall.

Harold Brodkey

#16. In the marathon of life negativity is never as light-footed as a dreamer's sprint.

Bryant McGill

#17. Out of the nameless and unfathomed weavings of billion-footed life, out of the dark abyss of time and duty, blind chance had brought these two together on a ship, and their first meeting had been upon the timeless and immortal seas that beat forever at the shores of the old earth.

Thomas Wolfe

#18. Players who stand flat footed and swing with their arms are golfers, not hitters.

Rogers Hornsby

#19. She'd never know what to do with children: Francis had wrong-footed her so completely that she'd come to think of them as delightful but volatile species no more to be trusted than cats.

Sarah Perry

#20. At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?

Thomas Carlyle

#21. If someone makes you feel wrong-footed, you're unlikely to find them witty.

Rosamund Pike

#22. I have certainly been very front footed about increasing our gender representation at Westpac.

Gail Kelly

#23. Vanity may be likened to the smooth-skinned and velvet-footed mouse, nibbling about forever in expectation of a crumb; while self-esteem is too apt to take the likeness of the huge butcher's dog, who carries off your steaks, and growls at you as be goes.

William Gilmore Simms

#24. I want to go about like the light-footed goats.

Johanna Spyri

#25. come, ancient and unchanging night
Night, born as dethroned king,
Night, internally equal to silence, Night.
With sequins of volatile starlight
Woven on your robe with infinity
Come quietly
Come fleet-footed
Come alone.

Pierre Peju

#26. Follow Through is elegant, sure footed, smart - a nest of sticks that won't stay sticks - a nest of sticks that snowballs - scary and marvelous.

Lucy Corin

#27. When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

Frank Stella

#28. we have forgotten that we were born
of celestial cataclysm.

we have forgotten how to dance
bare-footed on the earth to the cadence
of our souls. we have forgotten the ritual
fires and the acrid tang of holy smoke
on our tongues.

Beth Morey

#29. Beyond age, leaf withered, man goes three footed no stronger than a child is, a dream that falters in daylight.

Aeschylus

#30. But she was old, and old women do tend to get pushed aside at big gatherings - even when they have footed the bill for that gathering.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#31. When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#32. If blacks were given the right to vote, that would place every splay-footed, bandy-shanked, hump-backed, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, woolly-headed, ebon-colored in the country upon an equality with the poor white man.

Andrew Johnson

#33. My father usually agreed with her requests, because stamped in his two-footed stance and jaw was the word Provider, and he loved her the way a bird-watcher's heart leaps when he hears the call of the roseate spoonbill, a fluffy pink wader, calling its lilting coo-coo from the mangroves.

Aimee Bender

#34. The skin of moss / holds the footprints of / star-footed birds.

Nancy Willard

#35. Pray steal me not, I'm Mrs. Dingley's, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.

Jonathan Swift

#36. There was money enough ... but she asked so much of life, in ways so complex and immaterial. He thought of her as walking bare-footed through a stony waste. No one would understand her- no one would pity her- and he, who did both, was powerless to come to her aid.

Edith Wharton

#37. I think that we want to be led slightly astray when we're being told a story. Just a little wrong footed.

Kelly Link

#38. It was an unwritten law that black comics were not permitted to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn't stand flat-footed and talk; that was a no-no.

Dick Gregory

#39. People say that New Yorkers aren't friendly, but I think they're more friendly than Londoners. Here there is a front-footed nature of Americans. You can go out on a night out and meet 10 random people and stay in touch with them, whereas that's not going to happen in the same way in London.

Theo James

#40. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind.

George Eliot

#41. That in the face of smarter women it was best to beat a continuous retreat, to slash and burn one's own personal convictions before their sure-footed advance.

Gary Shteyngart

#42. Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#43. Let the straight-limbed laugh at the club-footed, the white skinned at the blackamoor.

Juvenal

#44. I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.

Jeanette Winterson

#45. She took off her wheel, took off her bell, took off her wig, said, how do I smell? I hot footed it barenaked out the window.

Bob Dylan

#46. I think a band that doesn't have a sense of humor can come up with their own take on whimsy.Kind of lead-footed and ham-handed, but I think just all the better for that.

Michael McKean

#47. When you're in elected office, you always have to operate under the assumption that you're in a dog fight for re-election. It's when you don't prepare for a tough battle, when you're caught flat-footed, that you're vulnerable.

Kevin Yoder

#48. The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms.

Florence King

#49. To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.

Felix Frankfurter

#50. Brendan O'Meara's Six Weeks in Saratoga is a victory to be savored by those who treasure good writing in general and tales of the track in particular. Horses may win races, but they also win hearts as this impressive book proves beyond doubt. A memorable, sure-footed debut.

Madeleine Blais

#51. The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.

George Saunders

#52. Red-haired, black-lipped, club-footed, and blink-eyed; if you're a good man, you're a wonder!

Martial

#53. I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

Louis MacNeice

#54. I had to bear the sunken glare of his fierce crow-footed eyes if I wanted to know; and so I bore it, reflecting how much certain forms of evil are akin to madness, derived from intense egoism, inflamed by resistance, tearing the soul to pieces, and giving factitious vigour to the body.

Joseph Conrad

#55. Historically, the coupling of president and Speaker has been a tricky one that encourages a choreography both quick-footed and wary

Chris Matthews

#56. When lizard-footed giants climbed the hills And with a hundred hands clawed at the sky.

Ovid

#57. Out, Himmler! Out of my sight! Go and visit your club-footed daughter! Bring her sauerkraut! Sauerkraut and heroin, Thorndike! She will love it! She will - !

William Peter Blatty

#58. Without warning, I stomped my heel down on Detective Hawke's toe. Hard. He squealed and did a one-footed jig. I debated on clapping along.

Ann Charles

#59. To a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-footed animal is an animal.

Bertrand Russell

#60. it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

E. E. Cummings

#61. Unfortunately, when a flat footed Elder God wants to harass you, there's not a lot you can do but sit there and take it.

Dennis Liggio

#62. Maybe it's wrong-footed trying to fit people into the world, rather than trying to make the world a better place for people.
[as quoted in "Brain Gain" by Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 4/27/09 issue]

Paul McHugh

#63. He was not adept at reading Shadowhunter hearts, behind their smooth angelically arrogant facades. He thought that might be why Alec had surprised him so much, had wrong-footed him so that Magnus had stumbled into feelings he had not planned to have. Alec had no facade at all.

Cassandra Clare

#64. I didn't realize, when I decided to be a comic, that a black person had never been allowed to stand flat-footed in America and talk to white folks. It never happened before.

Dick Gregory

#65. The Spring is here
the delicate footed May,
With its slight fingers full of leaves and flowers,
And with it comes a thirst to be away.
In lovelier scenes to pass these sweeter hours.

Nathaniel Parker Willis

#66. I reject what I see as flat-footed accounts of the fundamental structure of the world, where we somehow assume that, because ordinary experience involves middle-sized objects in space and time, that fundamental reality must be essentially like that.

L.A. Paul

#67. Oh, hell." He landed beside me, soft-footed on the pine needles. "This is beginning to have all the elements of a farce, isn't it? Too many villains, and nothing to tie them up with.

Mary Stewart

#68. If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.

Ron Paul

#69. This was her flaw as a parent, she thought later: she had never truly gotten rid of a single maternal worry. They were all in the closet, with the minuscule footed pajamas and hand-knit baby hats, and every day Laura took them out, unfolded them, tried to put them to use.

Elizabeth McCracken

#70. The fellows that I played with encouraged me to bunt and beat the ball out. I was anxious to make good and did as I was told. When I came to Brooklyn, I adopted an altogether different style of hitting. I stood flat-footed at the plate and slugged. That was my natural style.

Zack Wheat

#71. A ballet of nimble-footed waitresses moved among the tables

Beth Hoffman