Knock Off Quotes

“Life is like crossing a river. If you take a huge step-aim for too bigger dreams-then the current will knock you off your feet and carry you away.
The way to do it is small steps, you will take hold of life. You will get there in the end.”

— Louis Sachar

“Then I tug the toaster from the wall and swing the appliance around my head like a lasso. I'm not aiming to knock her out. I'm aiming to knock off her fucking head.”

— J.A. Konrath

“At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against a tree to knock off all the ants. Then I'm happy. With a stunted oak tree for shelter and a never-ending view, I am hidden. No one knows where I am. The nine-year-old's thrill of the hideout under the hydrangea comes back: My mother is calling me and I am not answering.”

— Frances Mayes

“I didn't like that look, and I didn't want it. But you can't just tell someone to knock off her look because she'll only give you another. And if you happen to raise your voice too much while asking her to stop looking, she'll hurry off to tell a friend about your behavior the second you walk out of earshot. And then that friend will come find you under some kind of pretense, wanting to decipher what's up your ass today.”

— Andrea Seigel

“Knock, knock.
who's there?
it's cancer.
cancer who?
cancer of the section right behind your belly button that you have been trying to pass off as the pinch of ovulation. but it's not. it's cancer. it's me.”

— Laurie Notaro

“Evil became invisible when it was everywhere. Like air, everyone forgot it was there until it was blowing hard enough to knock off their hat or muss up their hair.”

— Sean DeLauder

“When you knock off work tonight, go looking for Toby, because, trust me, he will be looking for you.”

— C.J. Duggan

“Sometimes when the poop hits the fan we should block it and run, sometimes we should haul off and knock it for a loop back at the spinning blades. Wisdom is knowing two things. One is which time is which. The other is that no matter what you do you're gonna get crap on your hand.”

— Faith Hunter

“Honestly, seriously, you don't know what to do about food? Here is an idea: Eat like an adult. Stop eating fast food, stop eating kid's cereal, knock it off with all the sweets and comfort foods whenever your favorite show is not on when you want it on, ease up on the snacking and-don't act like you don't know this-eat vegetables and fruits more. Really, how difficult is this? Stop with the whining. Stop with the excuses. Act like an adult and stop eating like a television commercial. Grow up.”

— Dan John

“I've been meaning to go shopping for boxing gloves, but I've been putting it off. I just need to knock it out and be done with it.”

— Jarod Kintz

“If she in fact knows magic she needs to do a spell to adjust that shitty attitude she has all of a sudden," Nona said. "I may not be a witch, but I will knock her right off that broomstick if she keeps this up.”

— Holly Hood

“Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, 'May I come in?' is not the true laughter. No! he is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person; he choose no time of suitability. He say, 'I am here.' ... Oh, friend John, it is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles; and yet when King Laugh come he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall - all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. And believe me, friend John, that he is good to come, and kind. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come; and, like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again; and we bear to go on with our labour, what it may be.”

— Bram Stoker

“It's a fun thing to do: Go to a shooting range with a buddy, knock off a few rounds, release stress.”

— Laurie Holden

“I don't have a real plan when I do an interview. I have some themes that I want to hit. But I don't have a set list of questions that I knock off.”

— George Stroumboulopoulos

“I know about lots of things that have nothing to do with being Asian, that you would never guess from looking at me. I know all about musical theater. I could go on 'Jeopardy!' and knock off the whole Broadway show tunes category. Also the whole Bible stories category.”

— B. D. Wong

“Hamp would ask me about tempos in the band: 'Jacquet,' he'd say, 'knock off that tempo.' A lot of jazz musicians didn't prefer to play for dancers, which was their loss, really. But good jazz has always had that dance feel.”

— Illinois Jacquet

“I am willing to be a literary thief if it has so been ordained; I am even willing to be caught robbing the ancient dead alongside of Hopkinson Smith, for he is my friend and a good fellow, and I think would be as honest as any one if he could do it without occasioning remark; but I am not willing to antedate his crimes by fifteen hundred years. I must ask you to knock off part of that.”

— Mark Twain

“Forgers can start with the same photographic images Warhol did, and sometimes knock off silkscreens only an expert can distinguish from the originals.”

— Michael Shnayerson

“O.K., if the desire to knock America off its pedestal, to redistribute American income to other countries, to shrink America's footprint in the world, makes you anti-American, then Obama is in fact anti-American.”

— Dinesh D'Souza

“We have to put people on pedestals; otherwise, there's no one to knock off pedestals.”

— Dean Devlin

“He seemed to be doing his best to marry into a family of pronounced loonies, and how the deuce he thought he was going to support even a mentally afflicted wife on nothing a year beat me. Old Bittlesham was bound to knock off his allowance if he did anything of the sort and, with a fellow like young Bingo, if you knocked off his allowance, you might just as well hit him on the head with an axe and make a clean job of it.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“She was rather like one of those innocent-tasting American drinks which creep imperceptibly into your system so that, before you know what you're doing, you're starting out to reform the world by force if necessary and pausing on your way to tell the large man in the corner that, if he looks at you like that, you will knock his head off.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“Knock the T off the word can't. You can do anything-ANYTHING-if you think you can!”

— Norman Vincent Peale

“Even professional, paid carers aren't always models of saintly behaviour - and they know they can knock off at the end of their shift to go home, take an uninterrupted shower, and have a normal conversation with someone.”

— Laurie Graham

“No, that thievery is." I shake my head, turning away from the replication. "Nobody likes a cheap knock-off. If you're going to be an artist, you've gotta do your own thing. Be your own person. Create what's in you instead of impersonating others. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I call bullshit. It's one thing to be inspired by something. It's another thing to fucking copy it.”

— J.M. Darhower

“Goodness, that stuff rips like paper," she exclaimed, reaching to pull her tank top off. She was halfway through the action when the door opened and Alec walked into the room.
"Izzy, are you-" he began. His eyes flew wide, and he backed up fast enough to smack his head into the wall behind him. "What is he doing here?"
Isabelle tugged her tank top back down and glared at her brother. "You don't knock now?"
"It-It's my bedroom!" Alec spluttered. He seemed to be deliberately trying not to look at Izzy and Simon, who were indeed in a very compromising position.”

— Cassandra Clare

“The time has come to knock off this religion business in American politics. There's no end to the mischief that can occur. It is like putting nitroglycerine in a Waring blender.”

— Lowell P. Weicker, Jr.

“The last few years I've been doing the Middle East thing, and it's a tough decision whether to go there and try and knock off some events as a European Tour member, this year I think overall looking at my results, I played a little bit better on the West Coast than I have in the Middle East, so that was another determining factor for coming back here to an event that I have had some success in the past.”

— Luke Donald

“What I'd do is not have USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy working with U.S. taxpayers' money to knock off an elected government in Ukraine, which is what they did. I wouldn't try to force the people of Ukraine into a deal with NATO against their interest or into a deal with the European Union, which is against their economic interest.”

— Dennis Kucinich

“I think that is why-why God allows hard things in life. To prepare us. To knock off rough edges-pride, bias, envy, selfishness-so that when we get to heaven we will be more in tune-more able to enjoy the beautiful things we'll find there. Maybe that's what the rewards will be. A deeper appreciation of what we are given-what we are a part of.”

— Janette Oke

“As a matter of fact, we had already been warned against sliding down the marble banisters, not out of fear that we might break a leg or an arm, for that never worried our parents-which was, I think, why we never broke anything-but because they feared that since we were growing up and gaining weight, we might knock over the busts of ancestors placed by our father on the banisters at the turn of every flight of stairs. Cosimo had, in fact, once brought down a bishop, a great-great-great-grandfather, miter and all; lie was punished, and since then he had learned to brake just before reaching the turn of a flight and jump off within a hair's-breadth of running into a bust.”

— Italo Calvino

“If you feel like keeping a journal-that neither you nor anyone else on earth will ever want to read-be my guest. But if you want to write something that may eventually see the light of day, that a magazine might buy or a publisher publish, then you'll have to knock off the journaling and do the grunt work that real writing requires.”

— Robert Masello

“Could there possibly have been an incumbent more easy to knock-off than George W. Bush? A real-life opposition party would have been insulted to be matched with a such an unworthy and frail rival. The Democrats, by contrast, got their lights punched out.”

— Marc Cooper

“The world loves a clone and a good knock-off. It cheats the artist ... In the obsession for technical wizardry, people disappear; and if your voice isn't present in a relationship, you don't matter.”

— Alonzo King

“I don't know if there's a proper way to define toughness in a runner, but I do know that there comes a sudden moment when the mindset shifts. The impossible becomes doable, or at least attemptable. The long run goes from two miles to four to ten to fifteen, until it becomes routine at some point deep in an intense training cycle to knock off a couple hours without giving it a thought.”

— Martin Dugard

“In Miami they're building all these hideous monstrosities. It's just so easy to be an architect, once you've got the ability to do your computer drawings. They just knock off each other. There's nothing creative in any of them.”

— Barbara Hulanicki

“Before you rob your first bank, knock off a couple of gas stations.”

— John Dillinger

“Before I got to Juilliard I remember that I had learned the first few bars to all the Sachse etudes in several different keys because I knew what was coming. So in the first year he was throwing these Sachse etudes at me and I would knock off the first eight bars and fly right through it. He would say, 'Alright, that's good enough.' But, in my third year, he said 'Get out the Sachse book.' I couldn't understand why. So I pull it out and he said, 'Here, start in the middle.' I was in trouble! He said, 'Hey Balm, I took you for a guy who knows how to transpose-you're nothing but a bugler!'”

— Neil Balme

“When you're that No. 1 seed, teams are gunning for you, everybody wants to be that team to knock you off. For us, we get a chance to face the No. 1 team for a second time this year, so let's see what happens.”

— Hines Ward

“I call wild niggas together like Cyrus,
And knock off more birds than the West Nile Virus.”

— Bumpy Knuckles

“God gives you the sight, the right, and the might to do great things, but you have to develop the fight! Courage doesn't happen without fear, doubt, and unbelief; courage overcomes all of these things to get the job done. How do we knock off fear or doubt out unbelief? Simple faith in God.”

— Tim Storey

“If you look hard enough, you can find race issues and racism in everything. I know people who say, 'See, I don't play pool 'cuz that's where the white ball chase the black ball off the table. So I prefer bowling, where the big black ball knock down the white pins with the red necks.'”

— Chi McBride

“The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.”

— Paul Muldoon

“When Hillary's getting knocked around by the folks on the Hill is Bill going to go Larry King to knock her enemies around? Will he be going off to foreign countries on his own little diplomatic missions? I had assumed he'd remain a step in the background as he has through through most of this decade. But that doesn't seem to be the case. If the constitution allowed it, I'd happily have Clinton back. I'd happily have Hillary in his place. But I don't want them both.”

— Josh Marshall

“Change is like to surfing. You can't just paddle into life, stand still and expect to stay on top of your board. The waves of change will knock you off and drag you under. Some people even think changes are fun! You are where you are because you want to be there. If you want to be somewhere else, you'll need to change.”

— Mark Victor Hansen

“Drink reacts on its practitioners in conflicting ways. One brave can knock off a quart of Scotch and look and act as sober as Herbert Hoover. Another, after three Martinis, makes two-cushion carroms off the chaise lounge as he attempts to negotiate the bathroom.”

— Tallulah Bankhead

“So you know what we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top, because the least among us make their way into those positions of power ... So what we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens inside a democratic state, I mean, what we are, are the propagandized masses inside a fascist dictatorship.”

— Terence McKenna

“It should be our endeavor to cultivate the peace and friendship of every nation ... Our interest will be to throw open the doors of commerce, and to knock off all its shackles, giving perfect freedom to all persons for the vent to whatever they may choose to bring into our ports, and asking the same in theirs.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“When I found Jesus Christ, I learned to be a better athlete. I didn't have to go out there and knock them out in the first round. I've learned to be patient, skillful in the ring. At the same time, I wanted to prove to other boxers that you can take off this killer instinct stuff, you can be a great athlete, a great boxer, and love your brother.”

— George Foreman

“Your situation and prospects only seem hopeless because you have ideas of hope. Knock off that hope and the crippling feelings of helplessness go with it.”

— U.G. Krishnamurti