Shifts Quotes

1. "I turn the water all the way hot, turn my back to the water, and I take it. I close my eyes and I'm on the hundredth floor with the jet-fuel fire at my back and the drop below. I take it and take it until I can't take it, until the heat takes over everything, and I jump, plummeting to the street I'm out of the shower. I turn my back to the mirror and look at the too-red skin behind my shoulder blades. The wind blows north and the smoke is here. Then the wind shifts and you can't smell a thing. Then the wind shifts again. Now you smell it, now you don't."
Author: Adam Berlin

2. "There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane's ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us." P. 38-39"
Author: Alain De Botton

3. "The truth frightens people because it isn't stable. It shifts every day."
Author: Alice Hoffman

4. "To judge from the entrance the dawn was making, it promised to be a very iffy day -- that is, blasts of angry sunlight one minute, fits of freezing rain the next, all of it seasoned with sudden gusts of wind -- one of those days when someone who is sensitive to abrupt shifts in weather and suffers them in his blood and brain is likely to change opinion and direction continuously, like those sheets of tin, cut in the shape of banners and roosters, that spin every which way on rooftops with each new puff of wind."
Author: Andrea Camilleri

5. "Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything--cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks--press inexorably on and on."
Author: Annie Proulx

6. "We are hunters or game, but rarely both. Knowing our role, and the crucial moment when that role shifts is the key to survival in this place."
Author: Artemas Khan

7. "I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires."
Author: Barbara Kingsolver

8. "Nat's face softens, her lips tilt at the corner and she speaks full of awe, "Wow." Still chuckling, I ask, "What?"She shifts from one foot to the other, looks to the ground and says softly, "That's the first time I've heard you laugh." She nervously plays with a ring on her finger. "That's one of the nicest sounds I've ever heard, Ghost. You should do it more often."
Author: Belle Aurora

9. "This world is clearly emerging before our eyes. The shifts ahead, the opportunities ahead are massive."
Author: Carly Fiorina

10. "Henry had never felt so happy. Freshperson year had been one thing, an adventure, an exhilaration, all in all a success, but it had also been exhausting, a constant struggle and adjustment and tumult. Now he was locked in. Every day that summer had the same framework, the alarm at the same time, meals and workouts and shifts and SuperBoost at the same times, over and over, and it was that sameness, that repetition, that gave life meaning. He savored the tiny variations, the incremental improvements--tuna fish on his salad instead of turkey; tow extra reps on the bench press. Every move he made had purpose."
Author: Chad Harbach

11. "The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends."
Author: Cicero

12. "Reality shifts occur when we are in a dreamy state of energized awareness in which we are clear about what we prefer"
Author: Cynthia Sue Larson

13. "Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one's life, mountains' forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one's own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back through oneself, this path we call the present tense, which becomes the continental divide when the tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded must sometime feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms."
Author: Dan Beachy Quick

14. "There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything. Your future shifts and warps with your smallest step, your shitty little whims. The man you will become is at your mercy."
Author: Dan Chaon

15. "Diindolylmethane (DIM)—This is a phytochemical found in cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower. It shifts estrogen metabolism to favor the friendly or harmless estrogen metabolites. DIM can significantly increase the urinary excretion of the "bad" estrogens in as little as four weeks. The typical dose of DIM is 75–300 mg per day. Omega-3 Fatty Acids (fish oils)—These contain eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), which has been reported in laboratory studies to help control estrogen metabolism and decrease the risk of breast cancer. Eating grass-fed organic beef also supplies these fats. I typically recommend 2,000 mg a day. Calcium d-glucarate—This natural compound is found in fruits and vegetables like apples, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and cabbage. Calcium d-glucarate inhibits the enzyme that contributes to breast, prostate, and colon cancers. It also reduces reabsorbed estrogen from the digestive tract."
Author: Daniel G. Amen

16. "Art and money are closely related. Try sitting down with a group of artists and ask them what's on their mind. Very quickly the topic shifts to money. And it can be very hard to get them off that subject."
Author: Dave Winer

17. "I know that of all the great shifts that have occurred in America--the freedom of slaves, the rights of women, the equality of gays and lesbians--none has happened easily, and certainly none has happened instantly and without serious attacks and backlash. But the reason we have these things is because the fair-minded people who came before us would not give up. In my life, I have seen elections stolen--either outright or through the electoral college. I have seen wars fought because there was no other way to get peace. I have seen the rich get richer and I have seen the poor get poorer. I have seen facts get harder and harder to hide--and easier and easier to manipulate. I have been angry and I have been frustrated and I have been ecstatic and I have been proven right and wrong and back again. I have given up on some things, but I have refused to give up on most things. And I can honestly say that all of it--all of it--seems to have led me to where we are, here and now."
Author: David Levithan

18. "My dear man,' said Lymond, ‘he was keeping the numbers down. If we hadn't taken precautions the whole of the noble Order of St John would be disporting itself at St Mary's under the delusion that it was earning merit by converting us to the Cross. As it is, another half dozen are due any day. Alec, now you've kept us right, I'd be grateful if you would see if the head of the column knows what the hell it's doing without you. Jerott, it won't help us in an ambush if the rearguard is agonizing silently over Joleta's jeopardized soul. Forget the brat. Remember, we're common, coarse fighting-men, not a heavenly host in our shifts."
Author: Dorothy Dunnett

19. ". . . We love fog becauseit shifts old anomalies into the elementssurrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing"
Author: Eavan Boland

20. "The interaction between math and physics is a two-way process, with each of the two subjects drawing from and inspiring the other. At different times, one of them may take the lead in developing a particular idea, only to yield to the other subject as focus shifts. But altogether, the two interact in a virtuous circle of mutual influence."
Author: Edward Frenkel

21. "Shift your attention, and your emotion shifts. Shift your emotion, and your attention shifts."
Author: Frederick Dodson

22. "I noticed how utterly indifferent the passengers were to what they were doing, namely, flying through the air. A glance out of the window would have revealed furrowed fields of cloud stained smoke-blue and violet as night and morning changed shifts –- but how were they passing time in First, Business and Coach? Crosswords. In-flight movies. Computer games. E-mail. Creation sprawls like a dewed and willing maiden outside your window awaiting only the lechery of your senses –- and what do you do? Complain about the dwarf cutlery. Plug your ears. Blind you eyes. Discuss Julia Roberts's hair. Ah, me. Sometimes I think my work is done."
Author: Glen Duncan

23. "...the Master and the boy followed each other as if drawn along the wires of some mechanism, until soon it could no longer be discerned which was coming and which going, which following and which leading, the old or the young man. Now it seemed to be the young man who showed honour and obedience to the old man, to authority and dignity; now again it was apparently the old man who was required to follow, serve, worship the figure of youth, of beginning, of mirth. And as he watched this at once senseless and significant dream circle, the dreamer felt alternately identical with the old man and the boy, now revering and now revered, now leading, now obeying; and in the course of these pendulum shifts there came a moment in which he was both, was simultaneously Master and small pupil; or rather he stood above both, was the instigator, conceiver, operator, and onlooker of the cycle, this futile spinning race between age and youth."
Author: Hermann Hesse

24. "…it can hardly be over-exaggerated that speculative thinking is always drawn from the necessities of the time, that it is always practical, that it always shifts with the interests of the times, with the changes of social, economic, and political conditions, and finally, that it is vain to hope to find an eternal, fixed, and immutable system of philosophy, and still hope for progress. A fixed system is applicable only to a dead society."
Author: Holly Estil Cunningham

25. "...they knew each other as much as they knew themselves, and their intimacy, rather like too many suitcases, was a matter of perpetual concern; together they moved slowly, clumsily, effecting lugubrious compromises, attending to delicate shifts of mood, repairing breaches. As individuals they didn't easily take offense; but together they managed to offend each other in surprising, unexpected ways; then the offender - it had happened twice since their arrival - became irritated by the cloying susceptibilities of the other, and they would continue to explore the twisting alleyways and sudden squares in silence, and with each step the city would recede as they locked tighter into each other's presence."
Author: Ian McEwan

26. "Sometimes life shifts.Sometimes life sucks.Sometimes life surprises you.Sometimes you gotta deal with it.Sometimes you are allowed to take a break.Sometimes you gotta get creative and make life shift back to get on track.Sometimes it doesn't work.Sometimes it does.But all the time, you've got to keep believing.You've got to endure.You've got to move on.You've got to be strong.You can't give up.You can't give in.You absolutely have to basically…just kick some life ass!!"
Author: Jacque Bliss All Things Bliss

27. "I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night.Only shifts.Only waiting."
Author: Joan Didion

28. "I started out mopping floors, waiting tables, and tending bar at my dad's tavern. I put myself through school working odd jobs and night shifts. I poured my heart and soul into a small business. And when I saw how out-of-touch Washington had become with the core values of this great nation, I put my name forward and ran for office."
Author: John Boehner

29. "Places change imperceptibly – in detail, at least – a good deal,' said the Doctor, making an effort to keep up a conversation that plainly would not go on itself; 'and people too; population shifts – there's an old fellow, sir, they call Death."
Author: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

30. "Life shifts, sometimes shakes like an earthquake."
Author: Kate Angell

31. "He was sick of the accidents, sick to his stomach. It was the darkness workers didn't see things. The shifts were too long, the tools too blunt, the wage too low.And he was the one they blamed."
Author: Kate Furnivall

32. "I'm just trying to spare you hurt. Her love for Konrad is like the foundation of the earth." "The earth sometimes shifts."
Author: Kenneth Oppel

33. "If they asked me, I did two shifts. I did sports, I did news, because I loved it."
Author: Larry King

34. "I heard my grandfathers voice. What do they think-- the storms will never come? You build a house on the sand, the sand shifts eventually... Remember that."
Author: Lisa Wingate

35. "I find that when people laugh it's usually because they're connecting and identifying in a way that they hadn't considered. That's my payoff. I'm not interested in other people thinking differently. I don't care. I'm just like yeast - I eat sugar and I shit alcohol. And there's a huge culture that goes with that. Alcohol creates massive shifts in world history, and it changes people's lives. People get pregnant because of alcohol. But the yeast doesn't give a fuck. The yeast isn't going, "I really want to help people loosen up and bring passion into Irish people's lives"."
Author: Louis C.K.

36. "All varieties of the producers' policy are advocated on the ground of their alleged ability to raise the party members' standard of living. Protectionism and economic self-sufficiency, labor union pressure and compulsion, labor legislation, minimum wage rates, public spending, credit expansion, subsidies, and other makeshifts are always recommended by their advocates as the most suitable or the only means to increase the real income of the people for whose votes they canvass. Every contemporary statesman or politician invariably tells his voters: My program will make you as affluent as conditions may permit, while my adversaries' program will bring you want and misery."
Author: Ludwig Von Mises

37. "As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there's something below it, I won't know it. But that's part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn't the ocean that killed my father, in the end. The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I'm perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

38. "We need, between us and the fish which, if we saw it for the first time cooked and served on a table, would not appear worth the endless shifts and wiles required to catch it, the intervention, during our afternoons with the rod, of the rippling eddy to whose surface come flashing, without our quite knowing what we intend to do with them, the bright gleam of flesh, the hint of a form, in the fluidity of a transparent and mobile azure."
Author: Marcel Proust

39. "It's a wonder they can sit down at all, and when they walk, nothing touches their legs under the billowing skirts, except their shifts and stockings. They are like swans, drifting along on unseen feet; or else like the jellyfish in the waters of the rocky harbour near our house, when I was little, before I ever made the long sad journey across the ocean. They were bell-shaped and ruffled, gracefully waving and lovely under the sea; but if they washed up on the beach and dried out in the sun there was nothing left of them. And that is what the ladies are like: mostly water."
Author: Margaret Atwood

40. "When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you."
Author: Marya Hornbacher

41. "Look, I say. You can't just let your thoughts float around in the ether and hope eventually they'll connect with something. It's absurd.No, it's not, Gil says. Lots of good things happen that way. Penicillin. Teflon. Smart dust. Something happens that you weren't expecting and it shifts the outcome completely. You have to be open to it. When I open my brain, I tell him, things bounce around and fall out. They don't connect with anything. Maybe I haven't got enough points of reference stored up yet.You're young, he says, that's probably it. When I let my thoughts float around, I trust that they'll latch on to something useful in the end or make an association I wouldn't necessarily have predicted. I'm trusting that they'll find the right thought to complete, all by themselves. The right bit of fact to ping. You have to trust your brain sometimes."
Author: Meg Rosoff

42. "I though I made it clear that harming you isn't high on my list of priorities." He shifts her in his hold so that while he is speaking, he is looking directly into her eyes. "And even if it was - which it isn't - I certainly wouldn't go about hurting you in such a half-coccked way, nor would I do it when your back was turned. As with most other things, I'd do it face-to-face and with finesse."
Author: Nenia Campbell

43. "A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts..."
Author: Pat Conroy

44. "Wait, we can not break bread with you. You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, and you will play golf, and eat hot h'ors d'ourves. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They said do not trust the pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller. And for all of these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground."
Author: Paul Rudnick

45. "Times change. God doesn't, but times do. We learn and grow, and the world around us shifts, and the Christian faith is alive only when it is listening, morphing, innovating, letting go of whatever has gotten in the way of Jesus and embracing whatever will help us be more and more the people God wants us to be."
Author: Rob Bell

46. "Color Theory"How yellow the sky how little the understandingIntangible the things we know for sureDusty silica clouds over Europe the very same dayWe brought our baby home His second Too yellowFor comfort Too sleepy Just sleepy enoughFor us to sleep ourselves That was last nightToday the clouds shift Outside shifts Rain and shadowsA mezzotint glow Then no glow Heart or soulExactly seven pounds of civilizationHematochrome and skin and bilirubinYawns blinks and can't make up his made-up mindThe atmosphere can't keep its own eyes openWe can't keep our own eyes closed"
Author: Stephen Burt

47. "It's my conviction that slight shifts in imagination have more impact on living than major efforts at change... deep changes in life follow movements in imagination."
Author: Thomas Moore

48. "All through that winter and into the spring, when our Tuesday and Thursday-night dinner shifts were done, Matt and I would sit at the long table near the salad bar and plan his end-of-the-year party, our voices echoing importantly in the cavernous wood-panelled dining hall."
Author: Tom Perrotta

49. "What, then, are some of the shifts that have happened in our understanding of the composing process that make a focus on digital writing in the writing workshop that much more compelling?"
Author: Troy Hicks

50. "Only 12 managers have lasted more than three years with the Indians, and only three of those who did last longer than three years managed to do so without a winning record. The Indians have made strides in many areas the last three years and the shifts and changes amongst the coaching staff resulted in a highly respected group that was anxious and ready to guide the Tribe back to the postseason, but unfortunately it never materialized. Turns out the three-year threshold is a pretty solid limit for how patient an organization is when it comes to managers, and the gains made in 2011 were completely lost and then some in 2012. Acta's tenure with the club came to an end with six games left on the 2012 schedule. He ranks 13th in franchise history for games managed, but any optimisim regarding the Tribe in 2013 will rest squarely with new hire Terry Francona."
Author: Tucker Elliot

Shifts Quotes Pictures