The Pendulum Quotes

#1. He was feeling happy. It was one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhiliration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings. (The Power and the Glory)

Graham Greene

#2. It had a very long pendulum, and the pendulum swung with a slow tick-tock that set his teeth on edge, because it was the the kind of delibrate, annoying ticking that wanted to make it abundantly clear that every tick and every tock was stripping another second off your life.

Terry Pratchett

#3. The pendulum had swung too far, as always, and now was swinging back, and the horror of intolerance had been loosed upon the land.

Clifford D. Simak

#4. No! I don't want to Ouija, or do the pendulum thing, and I swear if I see one tarot card or rune stone I'll yack cupcake all over you. (Grace)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#5. Each time it goes around a little bit, a second goes away."
"Where?" I asked, as the pendulum swung again. And again.
He winked at me. "It escapes. That's why they call it that. Escapement.

Kristopher Jansma

#6. We're waiting for the pendulum to swing back again, which I am absolutely confident it will.

Don Bluth

#7. Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic.

Ray Bradbury

#8. From that moment the pendulum went into reverse

Gerald Sinstadt

#9. That's sort of overkill. We've had 70 years of the Ryder Cup, and it's gotten along just fine. The pendulum will swing back without making a monumental thing about it.

Jack Nicklaus

#10. But the pendulum has swung way out of whack here. A bad idea is still bad, and the pivot happy world we're in today feels suboptimal.

Sam Altman

#11. The pendulum of economic power might well begin to shift from capital back to labor.

Stephen S. Roach

#12. His cock swung from side to side like the pendulum of a grandfather clock on speed.

Stephen King

#13. The pendulum is swinging back to the HD-DVD camp.

John Freeman

#14. The pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering-that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience, and Boredom ... that must be considered as the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils.

Samuel Beckett

#15. The people beneath the pendulum were in their own orbits of bliss or grief, which Shawna did not want to invade. Instead she made her way upstairs, reading the inscriptions that caught her eye, moved by the sheer accumulation of loss. Grief-fiti. That's what it was.

Armistead Maupin

#16. The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so sensitive.

Clint Eastwood

#17. It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

Graham Greene

#18. I think that the pendulum will swing back to the other side one day.

Susan Anton

#19. The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

C. G. Jung

#20. Men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving.

George Bernard Shaw

#21. Cordelia glared at me. 'I expect if someone strapped you to table an swung an axe over your naked quivering flesh like The Pit and the Pendulum, you'd be correcting his grammar'.

Victoria Clayton

#22. I was this little blond girl with a guitar case bigger than me - it was pink and sparkly at the time. But I always took myself seriously, and I think that people took that seriously. I would tell them about my goal list, and they listened. I was like, 'I want to be the one that swings the pendulum.'

Kelsea Ballerini

#23. I have problems with this very extreme form of capitalism where the pendulum has swung so far in one direction, where the focus is completely on the short term, and no one is thinking about the consequences.

Noreena Hertz

#24. I'm not so sure that the conventional wisdom makes any sense. Yes, it might be technically easy to track people and all that. But in the long-term I'm optimistic that we'll see the pendulum swing back in the other direction towards more privacy.

Rod Humble

#25. So often the pendulum contines to swing with the side that has just pulled themselves out of the hole.

Tony Gubba

#26. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?

Walter M. Miller Jr.

#27. The pendulum swings between Light and Darkness

Brandon Mull

#28. It's only fashion that has said the pendulum has swung from extreme skepticism about extraterrestrial life to extreme credulity. The truth is somewhere in between.

Paul Davies

#29. No, no, no separate but equal ... never the twain shall meet. And the pendulum kept swinging and it came to rest in the bastard hybrid known as the Daily Show.

Mo Rocca

#30. Until recently, the question was 'Why can't a woman be more like a man?' It should have been changed to 'Why can't both sexes be more like the best parts of each other?' Instead, the pendulum swung to the 1960s feminist lapel button Adam Was a First Draft. True enough. So are we all.

Warren Farrell

#31. Yet we keep returning to reason precisely because it occupies the middle place; it is the revisited point on the swing of the pendulum between scepticism and enthusiasm.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#32. I felt as if I were riding a pendulum. Just as I would swing into the abyss of hopelessness, the pendulum would swing back with some small goodness.

Ruta Sepetys

#33. The pendulum of mathematics swings back and forth towards abstraction and away from it with a timing that remains to be estimated.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#34. And my brain goes quiet and my heart is calm and my life is at a standstill, and the pendulum that I am, all the swinging to and fro, finally stops and I feel like I finally found my center.

Katy Evans

#35. Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.

Man Ray

#36. A scale is only in balance for a brief second. Inevitably the pendulum swings. It's impossible to maintain.

Ivanka Trump

#37. Everything flows out and in; everything has its tides;
all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests
in everything; the measure of the swing to the right,
is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm
compensates

Three Initiates

#38. During the first World War women in the United States had a chance to try their capacities in wider fields of executive leadershipin industry. Must we always wait for war to give us opportunity? And must the pendulum always swing back in the busy world of work and workers during times of peace?

Mary Barnett Gilson

#39. Now it is as if she can hear the pendulum in the air in front of her: that huge golden bob, as wide across as a barrel, swinging on and on, never stopping. Grooving and regrooving its inhuman truth into the floor.

Anthony Doerr

#40. Amsterdam: Where the pendulum swings from God to a guilder.

Jessie Burton

#41. Many of the cataclysmic leadership failures were failures of rationality. The pendulum of leadership development needs to swing back toward the rational: strategy, creativity, foresight, decision-making, and analytics.

Paul Gibbons

#42. We are now vibrating between too much and too little government, and the pendulum will rest finally in the middle.

Thomas Jefferson

#43. Wherever you put it, Foucault's Pendulum swings from a motionless point while the earth rotates beneath it. Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the Pendulum from it.

Umberto Eco

#44. I think now we're seeing the pendulum switch back to this idea where conversations are more important, if not more important than documents.

Khoi Vinh

#45. I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.

Gillian Flynn

#46. Like a daisy fortune,
The pendulum of time
Beats in Dilara's heart
Loves me, loves me not...

-Tomris
October 1942, p.305.

A. Yavuz Oruc

#47. Amie blinked through the haze of her thoughts and the constant drum of the rains. A golden light swung back and forth in the distance like a pendulum and every second drew closer. Finally, Amie could tell it wasn't a faerie light but a lantern, carried by a small green-cloaked person.

Jennifer Silverwood

#48. The sun is good because it does the body good, and because it has the sense to reappear every day; therefore, whatever returns is good, not what passes and is done with.

Umberto Eco

#49. Here lies, in a "horizontal" position The "outside" case of Peter Pendulum, watch-maker. He departed this life "wound up" In hopes of being "taken in hand" by his Maker, And of being thoroughly "cleaned, repaired" and "set a-going" In the world to come.

Woodrow Wilson

#50. Ideas came with explosive immediacy, like an instant birth. Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum; it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.

Eugene Field

#51. The indifferent pendulum of the clock kept chopping off the seconds of life, calmly and precisely.

Maxim Gorky

#52. The great novelist vibrated between two decanters with the regularity of a pendulum.

Louisa May Alcott

#53. In Jesus the performance pendulum stops - both the pride of success and the despair of failure are absorbed by grace.

Melissa B. Kruger

#54. Our culture is just a series of checks and balances. The whole idea that we're in a battle between tyranny and freedom - it's a series of pendulum swings.

Jon Stewart

#55. History has always been a series of pendulum swings, but the individual doesn't have to get caught in that.

Robert Johnson

#56. He was hanging from one of the rafters in a laundry up near Frau Diller's. Another human pendulum. Another clock, stopped.

Markus Zusak

#57. But Tom," said the moon, "the swinging of your pendulums! Everyone's a pendulum swinging, to and fro, and always you're getting hit by someone else's swinging pendulum. You're minding your own business, but someone else'e pendulum is swinging around, and pow! you get it in the head.

Dave Eggers

#58. Justice belongs to those who claim it, but let the claimant beware lest he create new injustice by his claim and thus set the bloody pendulum of revenge into its inexorable motion

Frank Herbert

#59. And yet, from time to time, beneath this thick layer of amnesia, you can certainly sense something, an echo, distant, muted, but of what, precisely, it is impossible to say. Like finding yourself on the edge of a magnetic field, with no pendulum to pick up the radiation.

Patrick Modiano

#60. Who is moving in the distance? It is the clock's pendulum, Hired by the god of death To measure life.

Gu Cheng

#61. Now if this electron is displaced from its equilibrium position, a force that is directly proportional to the displacement restores it like a pendulum to its position of rest.

Pieter Zeeman

#62. Men who have seen life and death ... as an unbroken continuum, the swinging pendulum, have been able to move as freely into death as they walked through life. Socrates went to the grave almost perplexed by his companions' tears.

Voltaire

#63. All rooms move. Each of them swings in a pendulum motion between evening and morning, moving its inhabitants closer to the unknown land where they will be no more. But

Leena Krohn

#64. She swung like a pendulum, ticking away the seconds until she would be dead.

Bernice L. McFadden

#65. So I think in those circumstances, there's some potential that you could see a big pendulum swing like 1994, which people you thought weren't vulnerable all of the sudden get in trouble.

John Podesta

#66. The cloth was wrinkled and twisted from the struggle. His forehead was damp, and he lay his forearm across it and stared across the room at the clock. Its pendulum rotated and gathered momentum only to slow and reverse its course. He watched it for a time and slid out of the bed to dress.

Dave Newell

#67. Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#68. Damn all false antitheses to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings who oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ

D. A. Carson

#69. In death - no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed.

Edgar Allan Poe

#70. Pac-Man?" The beast looked up at me, oversized fangs giving it an expression that straddled the line between deadly and dopey. A string of drool waved pendulum-like from the jaw, pushing it firmly into the latter category. "When he was a puppy, he tried to eat a ghost," Pallas explained.

Jim C. Hines

#71. The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.

Yann Martel

#72. In many ways, America is on the receiving end of a pendulum that has been swung with great force, and for a long time, outward into the world. The impact is a wake-up call on every level.

Henry Rollins

#73. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.

Cormac McCarthy

#74. Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.

Carl Sandburg

#75. Dahling, they've always hated me, but this has to be the final nail in the coffee. They're jealous because their mother gave me her diamond pendulum on my wedding day. Now they're demanding it back. They hound me day and night. My God, it's like they have channel vision.

Delora Dennis

#76. We're stepping into a new world, and an entire way of thinking must be changed. But the old ideas can't be easily discarded. Like a pendulum, new ways must swing to the other side before returning.

Gail Tsukiyama

#77. Realization is a pendulum the size of the moon. It won't stop slamming into me.

Tahereh Mafi

#78. She had
become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the
air he breathed
necessary but scarcely noticed.

O. Henry

#79. If you have pendulum clocks on the wall and start them all at different times, after a while the pendulums will all swing in synchronicity. The same thing happens with heart cells in a Petri dish: They start beating in rhythm even when they're not touching one another.

Bruce Lipton

#80. There are only hallucinations, or perceptions, and that there are neither nights nor days ... and that life is continuous; yet that one would never be aware of its continuity, nor even that life exists without these pendulum movements; and life is primarily verified by the beating of the heart

Alfred Jarry

#81. All my work keeps going like a pendulum; it seems to swing back to something I was involved with earlier, or it moves between horizontality and verticality, circularlity, or a composite of them. For me, I suppose, that change is the only constant.

Lee Krasner

#82. The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public consciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs

Barbara Ehrenreich

#83. I'm trying to mix the cool, independent stuff with the big stuff, but it's been difficult finding the right roles. It's been an interesting ride as far as my career pendulum is concerned.

Orlando Bloom

#84. The whistle dropped from the branch's spindly fingers like a black cocoon, a pendulum of secret music; the wind pushed sound soundlessly around.

Karen Russell

#85. I'm always fascinated by losers. Also, in my "Foucault's Pendulum," the main characters, who are in a way losers, they are more interesting than the winners.

Umberto Eco

#86. Your history is animal. Your future is divinity. Right now, you are like a pendulum, swinging between the two.

Jaggi Vasudev

#87. They who refuse education to a black man would turn the South into a vast poorhouse, and labor into a pendulum, necessity vibrating between poverty and indolence.

Henry Ward Beecher