Quotes About Nailing It

“A big book is like a serious relationship; it requires a commitment. Not only that, but there's no guarantee that you will enjoy it, or that it will have a happy ending. Kind of like going out with a girl, having to spend time every day with her - with absolutely no guarantee of nailing her in the end. No thanks.”

— Mick Foley

“If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue.”

— Terry Eagleton

“I was having a mildly paranoid day, mostly due to the fact that the mad priest lady from over the river had taken to nailing weasels to my front door again.”

— Warren Ellis

“I am in the process of nailing Mr. Humphrey Griffin to the wall so thoroughly that future generations will mistake him for a tapestry, ...”

— K.J. Charles

“Once I gave up the hunt for villains, I had little recourse but to take responsibility for my choices ... Needless to say, this is far less satisfying that nailing villains. It also turned out to be more healing in the end.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

“Well. Well?
What are you going to do? What are you going to say?
What are you going to say when you're drowning in your own dung and they keep booting you back into it, when all the screams in hell wouldn't be as loud as you want to scream, when you're at the bottom of the pit and the whole world's at the top, when it has but one face, a face without eyes or ears, and yet it watches and listens ... .
What are you going to do and say? Why, pardner, that's simple. It's easy as nailing your balls to a stump and falling off backwards. Snow again, pardner, and drift me hard, because that's an easy one.
You're gonna say, they can't keep a good man down. You're gonna say, a winner never quits and a quitter never wins. You're gonna smile, boy, you're gonna show 'em the ol' fightin' smile. And then you're gonna get out there an' hit 'em hard and fast and low, an'-an' Fight!”

— Jim Thompson

“There are more and more visibly weird and freaky people in the world these days, and it's high time we stop carrying forward the junior high school dynamic of excluding them all from our lives or worse ... nailing them to some cross.”

— Kate Bornstein

“Whoever said nothing is impossible obviously hasn't tried nailing Jell-O to a tree.”

— John Candy

“The student of history knows no more refreshing recreation than that of nailing liars, like vermin, to the wall.”

— Frederick Rolfe

“I don't do epilogues. I hate epilogues. It's like nailing the coffin shut on the story, allowing for no further growth and leaving no room for the readers' imaginations.”

— Rick Riordan

“I'll wait until we're both older," the kid went on, "and then I'll nail her."Van hit the brakes. "What?""Like you and Aunt Irene."Panic beginning to set in, Van asked again, "What?""That's what you told her last night when I was scrubbing the pots from dinner. You were going to nail her. Then you laughed."Oh, shit. "Uh, Ric ... ""And so I'll just wait until my future mate and I are older and then I'll nail her. Or we'll nail each other. That sounds like more fun. Nailing each other.""Listen, Ulrich-""What is that, anyway? Nailing? The way Aunt Irene smiled when you said it; I'm guessing its fun, right?”

— Shelly Laurenston

“All of the hot-dog stands were boarded up with strips of golden planking, sealing in all the mustard, onion, meat odors of the long, joyful summer. It was like nailing summer into a series of coffins.”

— Ray Bradbury

“Sorry!' Dave's friend yelled when he saw me. 'That was my-' But i wasn't listening as,instead,i took every bit of the anger and stress of the last few minutes and days put it behind the ball, throwing it overhead at the basket as hard as i could. It went flying, hitting the backboard and banging through the netless hoop at full speed before shooting back out and nailing Dave Wade squarely on the forehead. And just like that, he was down.”

— Sarah Dessen

“Medicine labours to restore 'natural' structure or 'normal' function. But greed, egoism, self-deception,and self-pity are not abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal any man from whom these failings were wholly absent? 'Natural,' if you like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen. We have only seen one such Man. And he was not at all like the psychologist's picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can't really be 'well adjusted' to your world if it says 'you havea devil' and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.”

— C.S. Lewis

“The clangor of the body shop comes up softly. It's noise comforts him, tells him he is hidden and safe, that while he hides men are busy nailing the world down, and toward the disembodied sounds his heart makes in darkness a motion of love.”

— John Updike

“The lamp tipped over, nailing Kane in the head.
Sabin shook his head. The man was a walking disaster Literally. Whenever Kane stepped into a room, things went to hell pretty quickly. Sabin expected the ceiling to cave in any moment. And yea, it had happened before.”

— Gena Showalter

“My brother and I had saved $15,000 by working many years nailing fruit crates together.”

— Robert Mondavi

“But whenever there's the right kind of nut making headlines, a Slasher or an Icepick Prowler, a certain number of people get pistol permits and a certain number of others buy illegal guns. Then some of them get drunk and shoot their wives. None of them ever seems to wind up nailing the Slasher. I”

— Lawrence Block

“I watched some serious '80s television. 'Alice,' 'Good Times,' 'The Jeffersons,' 'Family Ties,' 'Cheers' ... every night it was eat dinner, watch 'Cheers.' I was actually on 'Jeopardy' with Rebecca Lobo and Dot Richardson, and we were laughing because I was just nailing every random '80s trivia question - sitcom, theme music, movie, you name it.”

— Summer Sanders

“The hardest achievement in acting - in my opinion, anyway - is nailing a role that absolutely nobody else could have played. Pacino owned Michael Corleone ... but DeNiro could have owned it as well. Who else, though, but Val Kilmer could have nailed Jim Morrison? Does anyone besides Will Ferrell pull off Ron Burgundy?”

— Bill Simmons

“How a piece ends is very important to me. It's the last chance to leave an impression with the reader, the last shot at 'nailing' it. I love to write ending lines; usually, I know them first and write toward them, but if I knew how they came to me, I wouldn't tell.”

— S.E. Hinton

“For me, I always think about keeping my upper body relaxed, my hips level, and my right side down on the turn. If I work on nailing those three things at every practice, I hope that by the time I get into a race situation I can stay completely focused on the task at hand, and the rest will happen naturally.”

— Brittany Bowe

“Paul straightened, raking Elijah with a sweeping glance. "I've never seen a lycan shift so fast." "Betcha never seen a lycan who's nailing a vampress either," Vash said. "Syre's second, no less. It's a whole new world.”

— Sylvia Day

“If you think," he began, "that being sober and working steadily broke my bullshit meter, now you know better. I knew you were nailing Cross again from the moment you started back up."
Biting into my taco, I shot him a skeptical look.
"Eva honey, don't you think that if there were another man in New York who could bang it out all night like Cross, I would've found him by now?”

— Sylvia Day

“Payne nailing him in the face woke him up.
George brought him back his independence.
But Beth handed him his crown.”

— J.R. Ward

“It's unfair."
As a rule, life is unfair," I said.
Yeah, but I think I did say some awful things."
To Dick?"
Yeah."
I pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition. "That's just stupid, that kind of thinking," I said, nailing her with my eyes. "Instead of regretting what you did, you could have treated him decently from the beginning. You could've tried to be fair. But you didn't. You don't even have the right to be sorry.”

— Haruki Murakami

“I'm quite obsessed with the idea of nailing the girl friendship. It's such an art, so delicate.”

— Alanis Morissette

“To it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits[1] of the world, and not according to Christ. 9For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. 11In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. 13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.”

— Anonymous.

“But the windows of the house of Memory, and the windows of the house of Mercy, are not so easily closed as windows of glass and wood. They fly open unexpectedly; they rattle in the night; they must be nailed up. Mr. The Englishman had tried nailing them, but had not driven the nails quite home. So he passed but a disturbed evening and a worse night.”

— Charles Dickens

“Getting in shape for this role, which is incredibly demanding, vocally, has been a lot of hard work, but I'm nailing it. I'm even kind of, at times, blowing my own mind, because I am even able to talk right now.”

— David Hasselhoff

“Crucifixion was a widespread and exceedingly common form of execution in antiquity, one used by Persians, Indians, Assyrians, Scythians, Romans, and Greeks. Even the Jews practiced crucifixion; the punishment is mentioned numerous times in rabbinic sources. The reason crucifixion was so common is because it was so cheap. It could be carried out almost anywhere; all one needed was a tree. The torture could last for days without the need for an actual torturer. The procedure of the crucifixion-how the victim was hanged-was left completely to the executioner. Some were nailed with their heads downward. Some had their private parts impaled. Some were hooded. Most were stripped naked. It was Rome that conventionalized crucifixion as a form of state punishment, creating a sense of uniformity in the process, particularly when it came to the nailing of the hands and feet to a crossbeam.”

— Reza Aslan

“One glance and I knew exactly who and what he was. The classic alpha male, the kind who had spurred evolution forward about five million years ago by nailing every female in sight. They charmed, seduced, and behaved like bastards, and yet women were biologically incapable of resisting their magic DNA.”

— Lisa Kleypas

“Nailing him was like trying to thread a needle in a high wind.”

— Jack Dempsey

“War is only one facet of the larger problem of evil which has been with the human race since the beginning ... This same evil tried to destroy the greatest human being who ever lived, nailing Him to a cross.”

— Billy Graham

“Ah, 6655321, think on the divine suffering. Meditate on that, my boy.' And all the time he had this rich manny von of Scotch on him, and then he went off to his little cantora to peet some more. So I read all about the scourging and the crowning with thorns and then the cross veshch and all that cal, and I viddied better that there was something in it. While the stereo played bits of lovely Bach I closed my glazzies and viddied myself helping in and even taking charge of the tolchocking and the nailing in, being dressed in a like toga that was the heighth of Roman fashion. So being in Staja 84F was not all that wasted, and the Governor himself was very pleased to hear that I had taken to like Religion, and that was where I had my hopes.”

— Anthony Burgess

“My strongest quality as an actor is taking direction. I will give my performance as a template and if the director gives any instruction, I take that information, process it and morph it into the next take. I love the feeling I get when nailing a scene through direction.”

— James Preston Rogers

“When you're nailing a custard pie to the wall, and it starts to wilt, it doesn't do any good to hammer in more nails. Now”

— Wallace Stegner

“We are not masochists - the cross is not an end in itself; it is for glory. We Christians are not looking for suffering, but for joy. God, living in joy, wanted to communicate it to all people. This is why he sent it down into our misery, nailing it to the cross. At that point, the cross became the way toward joy. Christianity is not at all morality and prohibitions - first and foremost it is wonder before things.”

— Fabrice Hadjadj

“Someone from the Internet Writing Workshop sent me a link to the Gender Genie, where you paste in a section of text and it uses an algorithm to detect whether the author is male or female. Or, if you're an author, you can tell whether you're really nailing your opposite-sex characters. I mean, nailing their dialog.”

— Max Barry

“What I don't understand about mobile homes is that you have a mobile place to live, you park it, and you never move it again. That's like buying a Sony Walkman, and nailing it to your hi-fi.”

— Nick Hancock

“There are three pillars, regardless of your work culture, whether you're in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street: how you look, how you speak, and how you behave. It's all three things, and nailing them makes you a contender.”

— Sylvia Ann Hewlett

“I could see no reason why used tram tickets, bits of driftwood, buttons and old junk from attics and rubbish heaps should not serve well as materials for paintings; they suited the purpose just as well as factory-made paints It is possible to cry out using bits of old rubbish, and that's what I did, gluing and nailing them together.”

— Kurt Schwitters

“Literature especially has an interesting relationship to photography - to observation, to description, to fiction: taking something that you see and elaborating, jamming, and I think, staging ... taking that moment of observation and letting it go, giving it some wings, following it, rather than nailing it. You're riffing off of reality.”

— Larry Sultan

“Over the weekend, John Kerry - the big John Kerry juggernaut moves on - he won primaries in Washington D.C., Nevada and, I think, Canada. And he's so confident that he's started nailing that intern again.”

— David Letterman

“I want it to be more natural. Right now it feels really forced. Seems like I've never done a curtsy before, which may be true. But I'm looking forward to nailing it.”

— Serena Williams

“People used to ask me, 'What do you reckon you'll be doing when you're 40?', and I told 'em 'rocking out and kicking ass!' Now it's 'What do you reckon you'll be doing at 60?' and the answer's exactly the same. I'm always going to love Jimi Hendrix - 'Purple Haze' will still give me a hard-on when I'm hooked up to a life-support machine. Hey, even when I'm dead, they're going to have a hell of a job nailing the coffin lid down.”

— Steven Tyler

“People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

“It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall.”

— Boris Johnson

“To write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.”

— Virginia Woolf

“What do you miss about being alive?" The sound of my mom singing, a little off-key. The way my dad went to all my swim meets and I could hear his whistle when my head was underwater, even if he did yell at me afterward for not trying harder. I miss going to the library. I miss the smell of clothes fresh out of the dryer. I miss diving off the highest board and nailing the landing. I miss waffles" - p. 272.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson