Stagger Quotes

All men - even, I have written, Jesus Christ - began as flecks of tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes. (Camille Paglia)

Turgenev: The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.

Tom Stoppard

No one in this earthly prison of the body has sufficient strength of his own to press forward with a due degree of watchfulness, and the great majority [of Christians] are kept down with such great weakness that they stagger and halt and even creep on the ground, and so make very slight advances.

John Calvin

It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding.

Markus Zusak

Go now, verses, on your light feet, you have not trodden hard on the old earth where the graves laugh when they see their guests, the one corpse stacked on top of the other. Go now and stagger to her whom I do not know.

Hugo Claus

I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.

David Antin

I have given notice. I am going away to-morrow evening, I with my tremendous memory. Whatever may happen, whatever tragedies may be reserved for me in the future, my thought will not be graver or more important when I shall have lived my life with all its weight. But my whole body is one pain. I cannot stand on my legs any more. I stagger. I fall back on my bed. My eyes close and fill with smarting tears. I want to be crucified on the wall, but I cannot. My body becomes heavier and heavier and filled with sharper pain. My flesh is enraged against me.

Henri Barbusse

By remaining inaccessible, he became the epitome of those whom I have named and who stagger me. I was therefore chaste.

Jean Genet

She's all for not letting the sun go down without having started something calculated to stagger humanity.

P. G. Wodehouse

see them walking, if you dare if you call that walking stumble, stagger, fall and drag themselves along the streets of heaven.

Natalie Merchant

Flaubert read too many books, and in consequence some of his own books stagger under the weight of his erudition. He said he'd read some preposterous number of books to prepare for the writing of Salammbô, and you can feel them dragging the novel down. It would have been much better if he'd made it all up. (John Banville)

H-he is a messenger for you. H-h-he brings a message." "You stagger me, Simpkin! A messenger with a message! Extraordinary.

Jonathan Stroud

The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special and unmatchable talent for dullness, his central aim is not to expose the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity - in brief to stagger sophomores and other professors.

H. L. Mencken

First Let the rockets flash and the cannon thunder, This child is a marvel, a matchless wonder. A staggering child, a child astounding, Dazzling, diaperless, dumfounding, Stupendous, miraculous, unsurpassed, A child to stagger and flabbergast, Bright as a button, sharp as a thorn, And the only perfect one ever born. Second Arrived this evening at half-past nine. Everybody is doing fine. Is it a boy, or quite the reverse? You can call in the morning and ask the nurse.

Ogden Nash

Night. Two Icelandic Jóns stagger waywardly through a burning city. The learned Grindavíkian is bawling like a child. The farmer from Rein plods silently behind. The fire of Copenhagen is at their heels, driving them on in the direction of Nørreport. The sea of flames turns terrified folk into frantic silhouettes, fleshly phantoms.

Halldór Laxness

At first I did not feel much inclined to agree [ Willem Maris had asked Mauve to paint together in open air, around the village Oosterbeek, c. 1863 ], but I did not like to refuse the little fellow flatly, so we went off together. My companion did not suffer from loquacity; and, coming to a field with cows in it, I sat down to go on with a drawing which I had begun that morning. The little chap strolled around a bit and then settled down to work himself. We sat there for hours under the pollards, until I grew curious to see what the little fellow was at. He sat sketching with a bit of chalk; but, oh! I stood astounded. I seized him by the hand and stammered in my turn, 'My boy, what an artist you are! You stagger me! It's magnificent!

Anton Mauve

I very rarely use a credit card, but I do if I know I have big bills coming and I need to stagger payment.

Andrea McLean

We need art more than ever as we stagger toward the Millennium.

Fritz Scholder

Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.

James Gleick

Our new Abbot has a right honest unconscious feeling, without insolence as without fear or flutter, of what he is and what others are. A courage to quell the proudest, an honest pity to encourage the humblest. Withal there is a noble reticence in this Lord Abbot: much vain unreason he hears; lays up without response. He is not there to expect reason and nobleness of others; he is there to give them of his own reason and nobleness. Is he not their servant, as we said, who can suffer from them, and for them; bear the burden their poor spindle-limbs totter and stagger under; and in virtue thereof govern them, lead them out of weakness into strength, out of defeat into victory!

Thomas Carlyle

Values, means and ends... [that drive this process in current societies; mean that we now] stagger under the double load of not only having to construct (his) own future but having to create the values that will determine its design. (Fred Polak)

When he was born, I looked at my little boy and felt an unconditional love I never knew was inside me. As he grew, and I watched him stagger about, squeak his first words, and turn into a beautiful little boy, that feeling did not change.

Tony Parsons

Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us.

Daniel Burnham

The South is dry and will vote dry. That is, everybody sober enough to stagger to the polls will.

Will Rogers

These great 'Waves' – the one in Berlin ['The Wave' (La Vague), 1869] is prodigious, one of the marvels of the century, far more swollen and palpitating than this one [the painting 'Stormy Sea', Cézanne saw in the Louvre]; a muddier green and a dirtier orange [in 'The Wave' of Berlin] – a tangle of flying spray, a tide drawn from depths of eternity, a ragged sky, the livid sharpness of the whole scene. It seems to hit you full in the chest, you stagger back, the whole room reeks of sea-spray.

Gustave Courbet