Prod Quotes

“A few alligators are naturally of the vicious type and inclined to resent it when you prod them with a stick. You can find out which ones these are by prodding them.”

— Will Cuppy

“It always gave Wolf a peculiar thrill thus to tighten his grip upon his stick, thus to wrap himself more closely in his faded overcoat. Objects of this kind played a queer part in his secret life-illusion. His stick was like a plough-handle, a ship's runner, a gun, a spade, a sword, a spear. His threadbare overcoat was like a medieval jerkin, like a monk's habit, like a classic toga! It gave him a primeval delight merely to move one foot in front of the other, merely to prod the ground with his stick, merely to feel the flapping of his coat about his knees, when this mood predominated. It always associated itself with his consciousness of the historic continuity
so incredibly charged with marvels of dreamy fancy
of human beings moving to and fro across the earth. It associated itself, too, with his deep, obstinate quarrel with modern inventions, with modern machinery ...”

— John Cowper Powys

“There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.”

— Robert Frost

“And what of regrets? I shall live with them. I shall accept my regrets as part of my life, to be numbered among my self-inflicted wounds. But I will not endlessly gaze at them. I shall allow the memories to prod me into doing better with those still living. And I shall allow them to sharpen the vision and intensify the hope for that Great Day coming when we can all throw ourselves into each other's arms and say, I'm sorry.”

— Nicholas Wolterstorff

“As much as others may need to change, or we may want them to change, the only person we can continually inspire, prod, and shape-with any degree of success-is the person in the mirror.”

— Kerry Patterson

“Not only may you not enter the state without certification: you are, in the eyes of the state, not dead until you are certified dead; and you can be certified dead only by an officer who himself (herself) holds state certification. The state pursues the certification of death with extraordinary thoroughness-witness the dispatch of a host of forensic scientists and bureaucrats to scrutinize and photograph and prod and poke the mountain of human corpses left behind by the great tsunami of December 2004 in order to establish their individual identities. No expense is spared to ensure that the census of subjects shall be complete and accurate.
Whether the citizen lives or dies is not a concern of the state. What matters to the state and its records is whether the citizen is alive or dead.”

— J.M. Coetzee

“If you think someone is seriously on the prod for your ass, it keeps you awake.”

— Richard Bachman

“We are always held in the love of God. We are never wholly at the mercy of other people - they are only "second causes," and no matter how many second or third or fiftieth causes seem to be in control of what happens to us, it is God who is in charge, He who holds the keys, He who casts the lot finally into the lap. Trusting Him, then, requires that I leave some things to be decided by others. I must learn to relinquish the control I might wield over somebody else if the decision properly belongs to him. I must resist my urge to manipulate him, needle and prod and pester until he capitulates. I must trust God in him, trust God to do for both of us better than I know.”

— Elisabeth Elliot

“I faced Cole and Max. "Sorry, guys."
I lightly touched the hot poker to Max's back. he screamed and ran forward. Cole looked at him with an amused smile on his lips, then I did the same thing to Cole's back, angling it under the hem of his jacket. He lurched forward.
We ran this way for several long minutes, and eventually I didn't have to prod them as much.”

— Brodi Ashton

“He remembered Mrs. Dews' light brown eyes last night. The way they'd closed in bliss when he'd fed her the plum tart ... Her emotion was foreign, wild and exciting, and entirely fascinating
and she tried so very hard to hide it. Why? He wanted to spend time with the source of such powerful emotion. Wanted to experiment, poke and prod, see what else made her cheeks flush her breath come fast.”

— Elizabeth Hoyt

“Those whom the gods choose, 'tis said, they first separate from other mortals-by treachery, by stripping from you your spirit's lifeblood. The gods will take all your loved ones, one by one, to their death. And, as you harden, as you become what they seek, the gods smile and nod. Each company you shun brings you closer to them. 'Tis the shaping of a tool, son, the prod and pull, and the final succour they offer you is to end your loneliness-the very isolation they helped you create.”

— Steven Erikson

“I wonder if any of you have ever noticed that it is sometimes those who find most pleasure and amusement in their fellow man, and have most hope in his goodness, who get the reputation of being his most carping critics. Maybe it is that the satirist is so full of the possibilities of humankind in general, that he tends to draw a dark and garish picture when he tries to depict people as they are at any particular moment. The satirist is usually a pretty unpopular fellow. The only time he attains even fleeting popularity is when his works can be used by some political faction as a stick to beat out the brains of their opponents. Satirical writing is by definition unpopular writing. Its aim is to prod people into thinking. Thinking hurts.
(John Dos Passos, 1957, from the speech he delivered upon accepting the Gold Medal for Eminence in Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters)”

— John Dos Passos

“People want to do good things, they just need a prod sometimes, and what Twitter and other technologies that connect people are showing us is that if you make it a little easier for people then you will enable them to do what they want to do, to help people out, to form groups and do good.”

— Evan Williams

“I didn't feel like gymnastics were part of The Cars. I certainly philosophically didn't want to prod the audience to react to anything. To me, it was more like negative theater. We didn't really talk to the audience. I didn't see that being a part of this band.”

— Ric Ocasek

“Churches we build only by our own efforts and not in the strength of the Spirit will quickly collapse when we don't push and prod people along.”

— Francis Chan

“I don't know what the problem with Capitol is. Some one's got to wake 'em up. Prod 'em a little bit.”

— Les Baxter

“Wiggles hissed as I crossed the floor toward the throne. She fixed me with her empty hateful eyes and smelled the air, her long tongue shivering
through the slit of the lipless mouth. Nice to see you too, sweetheart. Remember my cattle prod?”

— Ilona Andrews

“Why has the car stopped?"
"Ah!" I said with manly frankness that became me well. "There you have me."
You see, I'm one of those birds who drive a lot but don't know the first thing about the works. The policy I pursue is to get aboard, prod the self-starter, and leave the rest to Nature. If anything goes wrong, I scream for an A.A. scout. It's a system that answers admirably as a rule, but on the present occasion it blew a fuse owing to the fact that there wasn't an A.A. scout within miles.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

“Calling out people for not voting, what experts term 'public shaming,' can prod someone to cast a ballot.”

— Charles Duhigg

“When you hit a groove, it's not you; it's the spirit world. The spirits whisper the ideas in your brain and prod you along. They're the ones that are really happy.”

— Tommy Chong

“It was him taught Idi Amin's lads how to extract voluntary confessions with the aid of an electric cattle-prod. Our chum likes them English and he likes them with a dirty past. He”

— John Le Carré

“My parents would have to put the fire hose on me to get me out of bed, to go to school in the morning. They would use a cattle prod and just shock me, or throw boiling water on me, or fire a gun next to my head, to get me out of bed.”

— Jackson Rathbone

“As a reader, you're often inside one or more character heads, so you know what they're feeling, even if they can't exactly say it, or they say it so obliquely that the other characters don't catch it. Readers are frequently reminded of the gulf between what people say and what they mean, and such moments prod us to become more attuned to gesture, tone, and language.”

— Will Schwalbe

“The mathematical question is "Why?" It's always why. And the only way we know how to answer such questions is to come up, from scratch, with these narrative arguments that explain it. So what I want to do with this book is open up this world of mathematical reality, the creatures that we build there, the questions that we ask there, the ways in which we poke and prod (known as problems), and how we can possibly craft these elegant reason-poems.”

— Paul Lockhart

“Life is about movement, expansion, growth, and actualizing potential. If you stay in a home, relationship, or job beyond the time it is healthy for you, the universe will prod you with thorns as if to say, "It's time to move to a broader domain." If you do not heed the message, the thorns will get sharper and at some point you will have no choice but to fly. When you do, you will understand why a once comfortable situation became uncomfortable.”

— Alan Cohen

“Promptings for us to do good come from the Holy Ghost. These promptings nudge us further along the straight and narrow path of discipleship. The natural man doesn't automatically think of doing good. It isn't natural. How many people worry about the car behind them or the person below them? The natural man just doesn't do it. For us, however, these promptings enlarge our awareness of other people's needs and then prod us to act accordingly.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

“Religion is a dangerous prod, because it can always be misused and get out of hand, but it's useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow.”

— Octavia Butler

“Although traditional incentives such as bonuses or recognition can prod people to better performance, no external motivators can get people to perform at their absolute best ... Wherever people gravitate within their work roles, indicates where their real pleasure lies-and that pleasure is itself motivating.”

— Daniel Goleman