Sleight Quotes

#1. (C)hoice without alternative is only a sleight of hand; it is a magician's force-play, during which you believe you have free well, but your fate has already been decided: the magician knows which card you will pick!

Garth Stein

#2. The best teachers impart knowledge through sleight of hand, like a magician.

Kate Betts

#3. children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive;

Anonymous

#4. Susan Straight finds LA's secret heart in Between Heaven and Here and with a sleight of hand only the masters have, she creates an alley, a neighborhood, a history that is as rich and tragic as any Shakespearean tale.

Walter Mosley

#5. I can juggle, not well ... I can balance a broom on my chin. I can do very simple carny tricks, a little sleight of hand with cards and coins.

Rich Sommer

#6. Then there is the excitement as a fish takes this daintiest of offerings, this sleight-of-hand made of fur and feather. Each sparkling fish you release is a bond to wildness.

Kevin C. Kelleher

#7. In the art of magic be quick of sleight and slow of climax.

Amit Kalantri

#8. Women are like tricks by sleight of hand,
Which, to admire, we should not understand

William Congreve

#9. I suppose that if I could only do one thing, a solid card effect would be pretty high on the list. That's the root of it all, sleight-of-hand. It's certainly the thing I feel most comfortable with.

Ricky Jay

#10. Our world is very dishonest, and our leaders encourage dishonesty by setting bad examples - by lying, being corrupt, and using political sleight of hand to sustain power.

Stuart Wilde

#11. I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author's sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left ...

Amy Tan

#12. If your sleight of hand causes you to break eye contact with your audience, it is too advanced for your skill level.

Jeff McBride

#13. There are spaces between the events we see where things get past us. Magicians know this too, with their sleight of hand tricks. If you can find the rhythm of those spaces, the openings in time, you can hide whole worlds inside them.

Kenneth Calhoun

#14. Like many shy people, once he began talking he seemed not to know how to stop; he lacked the social sleight of hand to change the subject, and he had no idea how to engage another person. Like a runaway vehicle, he plunged on, heedless.

Joyce Carol Oates

#15. In the winters, I enrolled in the hotel management program at Cornell University. I naively thought that I knew something about sleight-of-hand, entertainment and food, and that would be all I needed.

Ricky Jay

#16. Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked ... The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.

John Cheever

#17. Such is the sleight of hand by which we juggle with ourselves, and change our very weaknesses into stanch and most magnanimous virtues!

Charles Dickens

#18. One of the best sleight-of-hand guys I know is a plumber.

Ricky Jay

#19. That's Manhattan today - all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.

Andrew Vachss

#20. Happiness, you see, its just an illusion of Fate, a heavenly sleight of hand designed to make you believe in fairy tales. But there's no happily ever after. You'll only find happy endings in books. Some books.

Ellen Hopkins

#21. Lovers always believe one another's sleight-of-hand tricks.

Mason Cooley

#22. Storytelling draws on the magic of language to created Elsewheres. Writers use a linguistic sleight-of-hand to take an attribute, attach them to new objects, and create enchantment.

Maria Tatar

#23. A lot of the audience know that magic tricks are largely sleight of hand stuff, but they're intrigued by the mind stuff. They understand some of the principles behind it ... but they're confused by how it's all mixed together onstage, which is good for me.

Keith Barry

#24. Dai Vernon, the greatest sleight of hand figure in the history of the art, rarely performed. But he invented magic and had an enormous influence on the whole range of sleight of hand. And so often, the magic he was doing was to fool other magicians.

Ricky Jay

#25. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.

Cormac McCarthy

#26. Mass was like grand opera, a magic show with the most expensive props in town. And faith, a sleight of hand trick, in which one was both the magician and the audience; the deceiver and the deceived. Still, who could resist a good magic trick?

Kathleen Tessaro

#27. When [the magician] clicks his fingers and cards change to the four aces, we know we have experienced sleight of hand. Real magic would not be quite that quick and easy. Real magic would take investment. Real magic would draw you in, and make you nervous.

Derren Brown

#28. We're so used to being edited, so infected with the sleight of hand of the media, that we're more aware of what's been added than of what has been taken away.

Michael Marshall

#29. She saw now that he was like an illusionist who captivated women with a little sleight of hand and once she had seen the mechanism it had lost all power for her.

Anna Godbersen

#30. There is always some sleight of hand going on in writing autobiography. So much has to be left out, especially things that might hurt or dismay people. But in a novel one can say everything. The novel is often autobiography distilled and / or transcended.

May Sarton

#31. Everett was strange,' Sleight concedes. 'Kind of different. But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That's what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.' (pg. 96)

Jon Krakauer

#32. Between Ricky's charm and persuasion and Gabriel's lock picking and sleight of hand, if I took enough lessons, I could become a first-rate private eye. Or a master criminal.

Kelley Armstrong