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Exercise #81: Prep
Posted 11/1/04 - 11/11/04
Here are the “wow line”s submitted by The Desk Drawer listmembers from 11/1/04 through 11/11/04.
Submitted by Mamie Hanscom:
“--chili hot enough to put the squeak back into ten-year-old sneakers.”
-- R. C. Burdick, The Margaret Ellen
“--my mouth felt drier than butterless popcorn.”
-- R. C. Burdick, The Margaret Ellen
“It's like I ran out of bullets, and just threw the gun--”
-- said by John Goodman's character in the sitcom, Center of the Universe
“Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages, and uneven overlaps.”
-- Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
-- The Road Not Taken: Complete Poems of Robert Frost
“If there is no wind, row.”
-- Latin Proverb
Submitted by Jo Best:
“I prefer to think of myself as fertilizer, as food for the living energy of others who will follow me - the kind of fertilizer that can grow a beautiful rose.”
-- said by Eartha Kitt in What We Know So Far by Beth Benatovich
“So we are looking for a scumbag in NYC?”
-- said by FBI Agent Viv Johnson (played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste) in Missing: Without A Trace
“For a moment, I could believe that the stars, which were still visible, work like cooper's bands, holding together everything above Wyoming.”
-- Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
-- Martin Luther King
“It's a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's own heart, not be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals.”
-- D. H. Lawrence
“Power is strength and the ability to see yourself through your own eyes and not the eyes of another.”
-- Agnes Whistling Elk
“Persuasion would be a waste, I'd stay of my own free will.”
-- Nicole Combs, Exercise #78
“Zooming through the seasons.”
-- Mamie Hanscom, Exercise #78
“Jeez, Mom, you're so old. Don'tcha keep up with how to talk?”
-- Michelle Hakala, Exercise #74
“Had a beak like a parrot's pecker.”
-- Bob Burdick, Exercise #76
Submitted by Bob Burdick:
“When we've been there ten thousand years/ Bright shining as the sun,/ We've no less days to sing God's praise/ Than when we'd first begun.”
-- from the hymn Amazing Grace
“Thing is, Charlie, at my age I'm never sure if I've forgotten something or just never knew it.”
-- from conversation overheard at church
“I'm older than I've ever been before.
-- from an answer overheard to the question, "How are you?"
Submitted by Sally French:
“Find a bit less of nothing and a bit more of something.”
-- Nicole Combs, Exercise #75
“Incredible speed at an incredible price.”
-- SBC Yahoo DSL advertisement
Submitted by Krys Douglas:
“He rode through a landscape as barren as an exclamatory Oh.”
-- George Elliott, Felix Holt, the Radical
“True wit is nature/ To advantage dressed./ What oft was thought,/ But ne'er so well expressed.”
-- Alexander Pope, Essay on Man
Submitted by J. Martin Witherspoon:
“Shades flapped in yet other windows like ancient tongues lolling to be diagnosed by wind-borne small doctors of strange medicines.”
-- Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree
“It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.”
-- Neil Gaiman, Coraline
Submitted by Sharon Tabor Warren:
“Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.”
-- James Dean
“The gratification comes in the doing, not in the results.”
-- James Dean
“You'll reap what you sow.”
-- as quoted from my mom
“I don't care where you bury me as long as it's not in a purple dress.”
-- as quoted from a favorite aunt
Submitted by Michelle Hakala:
“She had fine clean skin, brushed with freckles, and in the sun her wheat-blonde hair had a touch of fire's gold in it.”
-- Kate Elliott, King's Dragon
“Judith paused and brushed a finger along her upper lip where a fine down of hair grew, the mark of her impending passage from fertility to wisdom.”
-- Kate Elliott, King's Dragon
“She had a need to feel the thunder/ To chase the lightning from the skies/ To watch a storm with all its wonder/ Raging in her lover's eyes.”
-- from Garth Brooks, “That Summer” (although lyric sites show them as different, this is the way I heard it)
“Near midday, at low tide, the river ran shallow near the mouth, glistening tidal flats scored by deeper channels coursing seaward.”
-- Kate Elliott, Prince of Dogs
“The feast of Christmas came, and went, the month of January wept to its chill conclusion, and Duchess Yolande did not arrive.”
-- Kate Elliott, The Burning Stone (changed slightly because it's set in another world with different months and would mean nothing to anyone who hadn't read the book)
“Blindness comes in many guises and a furious heart overflows down unexpected channels.”
-- Kate Elliott, The Burning Stone
“Word flew before them, and when they reached the village they were met by a delegation of village elders, three old women and two bent men who seemed to have about a dozen teeth between them.”
-- Kate Elliott, The Burning Stone
“He was careful not to touch her, but she felt him nevertheless.”
-- Kate Elliott, The Burning Stone
“Rain spits gently on his exposed cheek.”
-- Kate Elliott, The Burning Stone
“Algae lay exposed in intricate patterns like green paint flaking off the river stones.”
-- Kate Elliott, Child of Flame
“To the left lay a remarkable trail through a low-lying meadow lush with the most astoundingly beautiful flowers: lavender, yellow rue, blood-red poppies, delicate gillyvor, fat peonies, pale dog roses, vivid marigolds, banks of irises like earthbound rainbows, all intermixed with a scattering of urgently blue cornflowers.”
-- Kate Elliott, Child of Flame
“Then I saw the tears wellin' up in her troubled eyes when she started to speak:/ she looked at our pitiful shack and then she looked at me and took a ragged breath.”
-- Reba McEntire, "Fancy"
Submitted by Nicole Combs:
“Yeah. You know, that would work... about 400 years ago! You can't just go around killing people!”
-- Scotland, P.A. (man portraying a copy of one of MacBeth's three witches)
“So comes it, lady, you have been mistook. But nature to her bias drew in that. You would have contracted to a maid, nor are you therein, by my life, deceived. You are betrothed both to a maid and a man.”
-- Sebastian, in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
“Your master quits you, and for your service done him so much against the mettle of your sex, so far beneath your soft and tender breeding, and since you called me master for so long, here is my hand. You shall, from this time be your master's mistress.”
-- Orsino, in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
“You say that so often. I wonder what your basis of comparison is.”
-- Jareth, in Labyrinth
“How 'bout your ears? Take off your ears! You don't need two ears!”
-- Firey, in Labyrinth
“No, I said 'allo, but that's close enough.”
-- Worm, in Labyrinth
“Shows what you know, don't it?
-- Hoggle, in Labyrinth
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