Buffing Quotes

What a treasure that smile was, passed down through the ages from father to son, tucked away in hope chests during son-less generations, buffed and displayed proudly whenever company was over.

There was something in him, lighter than ego but darker than insecurity, that needed constant buffing, polishing, waxing.

You’ll learn that the key to a great book is editing — grinding, buffing, and polishing — not writing.

Look," Grace said. "How strange! In spite of the rain, you can still see the stars. How bright they are tonight." She pointed, but Lorcan didn't look. His eyes remained fixed intently on her. "I can't think of a finer sight in the whole world than the one I'm looking at right now," he said. In spite of being drenched, Grace flushed at his words. Lorcan's eyes sparkled at her, brighter than ever before. It was as if the rare blue gems of his iriseshad been washed by the rain amd buffed by the moonlight to a new intensity. "Grace, there's been something I've wanted to do for a very long time now, but things have kept getting in the way." He reached forward, bringing a hand to the side of her face. Then he gently but firmly drew her wet face toward his. He gazed at her, as if seeing her for the first time. Then he brought his soft lips down to hers and kissed her.

Hunter looked over at Darcangelo. "How'd you get here so fast?" "I was setting up that solicitation sting down on Colfax when the call came in. What took you so long? Getting your nails buffed?" "Hey, F*ck you. It's my day off." "Your day off? What is that sh*t?

I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.

Sophie, however, remained in place, buffing her ragged nails until she heard the deafening crash. Nonchalant, she crawled over the mass of moaning bodies at the door, wondering how boys had ever survived this long in nature if they didn’t even have the common sense to take turns going down stairs.

Rune the Insatiable. he buffed his black claws. "Wringing orgasms and breaking hearts for eons.

Human beings are curators. Each polishes his or her own favored memories, arranging them in order to create a narrative that pleases. Some events are repaired and buffed for display; others are deemed unworthy and cast aside, shelved belowground in the overflowing storeroom of the mind. There, with any luck, they are promptly forgotten. The process is not dishonest: it is the only way that people can live with themselves and the weight of their experiences.

One might trouble one's dainty snout with a whiff of the taleggio displayed in an artisanal cheese shop, or take a saucer of jasmine tea and a knuckle of fennel-scented snuff at a counter of buffed Big Nothing granite. But there was a want in these ladies yet, and it was for the rude life of youth.

The other side of mental blanketing - the buffing and puffing up of marriage to keep it seeming shiny and magical - is up against a formidable fact. Statistically speaking, the act of marrying is banal. Even though many Americans wait longer than ever to marry, and often do not stay long in the marriages they do enter, most Americans - close to 90 percent - still do marry at some point in their lives. Some try it over and over again. Marrying, then, does not make people special; it makes them conventional.

Whats it like, to be in love? The servants speak of it when they think I can't hear. I only wonder." Lia turned around and tossed the cushion back to the chaise lounge. She found she didn't have an answer to Mari's question. She couldn't say what she'd heard her sisters always say, It's thrilling, or It's bliss, or He makes me so happy. She raised her head and swallowed the strangeness in her throat, walking to the fireplace, to the pianoforte, pressing a finger against the honey-buffed wood. "It is," she said at last, "the most terrible feeling in the entire world." And she meant it. "Yes," the girl agreed, examining her face. "I think it must be.

A change in direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes! He would take charge of his life anew, binding his breaking selves together. Those changes in himself that he sought, he himself would initiate and make them. No more of this miasmic, absent drift. How had he ever persuaded himself that his money-mad burg would rescue him all by itself, this Gotham in which Jokers and Penguins were running riot with no Batman (or even Robin) to frustrate their schemes, this Metropolis built of Kryptonite in which no Superman dared set foot, where wealth was mistaken for riches and the joy of possession for happiness, where people lived such polished lives that the great rough truths of raw existence had been rubbed and buffed away, and in which human souls had wandered so separately for so long that they barely remembered how to touch; this city whose fabled electricity powered the electric fences that were being erected between men and men, and men and women, too? Rome did not fall because her armies weakened but because Romans forgot what being Roman meant. Might this new Rome actually be more provincial than its provinces; might these new Romans have forgotten what and how to value, or had they never known? Were all empires so undeserving, or was this one particularly crass? Was nobody in all this bustling endeavor and material plenitude engaged, any longer, on the deep quarry-work of the mind and heart? O Dream-America, was civilization's quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E!; or in million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confessional booth of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show; or in a spurt of gross-out dumb-and-dumber comedies designed for young people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Alain Ducasse? What of the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation? Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death's democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush's boredom and Al Bore's gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot? What, America, of the Grail? O ye Yankee Galahads, ye Hoosier Lancelots, O Parsifals of the stockyards, what of the Table Round? He felt a flood bursting in him and did not hold back. Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction. What he opposed in it he must also attack in himself. It made him want what it promised and eternally withheld. Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized: Indians, Uzbeks, Japanese, Lilliputians, all. America was the world's playing field, its rule book, umpire, and ball. Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town and the matter of America the only business at hand; and so, like everyone, Malik Solanka now walked its high corridors cap in hand, a supplicant at its feast; but that did not mean he could not look it in the eye. Arthur had fallen, Excalibur was lost and dark Mordred was king. Beside him on the throne of Camelot sat the queen, his sister, the witch Morgan le Fay.

So, when you kill yourself you turn into a buffed ghost with what- Justin Bieber hair?" ~ Zerodude to Brutus

You’ll learn that the key to a great book is editing—grinding, buffing, and polishing—not writing.

... the ladies who were going in, frightened by the first signs of droop and pucker, then going out again, buffed and tightened and resurfaced, irradiated and resurfaced. But still frightened, because when might the whole problem - the whole thing - start happening to them again? The whole signs-of-mortality thing. The whole thing thing. Nobody likes it, thought Toby - being a body, a thing.

When a lie has negative consequences, people dislike it. But otherwise? They move on, and eventually the lie as a lie is forgotten, or in this case, codified as the foundation of religious practice and buffed and sanded into something prettier and more congenial.

Suddenly, I feel out of my league.  He is a ten, and I’m lucky if I hit a seven after I’ve been buffed and polished at my favorite salon.  Not to mention, I have hips and an ass and a bit of a belly bulge that no matter how many sit-ups or yoga exercises I do, it just won’t go away.

They are looking for the smooth remains of bottles, shiny coins of broken glass worn smooth by the sea. This is what happens when things break. The pieces separate, scatter. They are battered by the elements, buffed and polished smooth, then deposited on far-off beaches. All your hopes and dreams.

You wonder about me. I wonder about you. Who are you and what are you doing? Are you in a New York subway car hanging from a strap, or soaking in your hot tub in Sunnyvale? Are you sunbathing on a sandy beach in Phuket, or having your toenails buffed in Brighton? Are you a male or a female or somewhat in between? Is your girlfriend cooking you a yummy dinner, or are you eating cold Chinese noodles from a box? Are you curled up with your back turned coldly toward your snoring wife, or are you eagerly waiting for your beautiful lover to finish his bath so you can make passionate love to him? Do you have a cat and is she sitting on your lap? Does her forehead smell like cedar trees and fresh sweet air?

Dios mío. <<¿Puedo compararte con una tarta helada?>>. Buf, no podría ser más gay por mucho que lo intentase.

Just like in Stefan Zweig’s Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman, Irène Fayolle looked only at Mr. Prudent’s hands during the speech for the defense. Large hands, which opened and closed. With pale, perfectly buffed nails. Irène Fayolle said to herself: It’s strange, this man’s hands haven’t aged. They have remained childlike, they are those of a young man. Pianist’s hands. When

He tried a different tack. “What could she do, one woman against two of us?” Nina stared. “You know me, and you ask what one woman can do?” “That’s different.” Because I’m a savage, she thought. Because to an honorable young man like Sebastian Graham, well educated and well meaning and knowing nothing at all about the female sex, a small woman with smooth hair and buffed nails simply did not register as dangerous.

The Cloisters, I knew, had been brought into being—like so many institutions—by John D. Rockefeller Jr. The robber baron’s son had transformed sixty-six isolated acres and a small collection of medieval art into a fully realized medieval monastery. Crumbling remnants of twelfth-century abbeys and priories had been imported throughout the 1930s from Europe and rebuilt under the watchful eye of architect Charles Collens. Buildings that had been left to the ravages of weather and wars were reassembled and polished to a new-world sheen—entire twelfth-century chapels restored, marble colonnades buffed to their original gloss.

Cus asked Steve to leave the room so he could talk to me in private. That’s when he told me he was dying from pneumonia. I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. He didn’t look morbidly ill. He was buffing. He had energy and zest. He was eating ice cream. He was chilling out, but I started freaking out. “I don’t want to do this shit without you,” I said, choking back tears. “I’m not going to do it.” “Well, if you don’t fight, you’ll realize that people can come back from the grave, because I’m going to haunt you for the rest of your life.” I told him “Okay,” and then he took my hand. “The world has to see you, Mike. You’re going to be champ of the world, the greatest out there,

He thought about how exuberant he himself used to feel as he got ready to meet Miriam when they first started courting. Butterflies flew in his stomach as he washed, shaved, slicked back his hair with a comb and smear of Brylcreem. He made sure that his suit and shirt were pressed, his shoes were buffed. He would put his comb in his pocket and whistle as he walked to meet her. There was an ice cream parlor where they would sit in the window and drink lemonade with a blob of vanilla floating on top, or they sometimes went to the cinema. At that time a trainee, he didn’t have much money so he would save up all week just in case Miriam wanted to go for a nice meal, but she was happy to go for a walk with him and with their simple dates.

Now am I daring to accuse American strategic planners of deliberately eradicating peasant villages in order to smoke out the girls who would have little choice but to sexually service the same boys who bombed, shelled, strafed, torched, pillaged, or merely forcibly evacuated said villages? I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.

Still, everything in their house was buffed to a high, flat shine, so much reflection to protect the fact that there was nothing underneath. They didn’t read; there were a few books, a set of encyclopedias (the wine-colored spines warmed up the den), but the only well-leafed volumes were instruction manuals, do-it-yourself how-to’s, cookbooks, and a haggard set of The Way Things Work, volumes one and two. They had no comprehension why anyone would seek out a film with an unhappy ending or buy a painting that wasn’t pretty. They owned a top-shelf stereo with speakers worth $1,000 apiece, but only a handful of easy-listening and best-of CDs: Opera Stoppers; Classical Greatest Hits. That sounds lazy, but I think it was more helpless: They didn’t know what music was for.

Yo ahora no creo en Dios, pero me parece que el cura del funeral del padre de Vera tampoco creía mucho, me refiero a la vida eterna y todo eso. Decía que el cielo era cuando se hacían las cosas bien y se era cariñoso con los demás, y el infierno cuando despreciabas a alguien y te equivocabas. Decía que el muerto se quedaba en nuestros recuerdos y que desde ahí nos iba a acompaña. Buf, no sé, los recuerdos, vale, sólo que los recuerdos están en mi cabeza, y ojalá estuvieran en otro sitio. Puestos a creer, yo preferiría una aparición total, aunque fuera un padre de Vera medio transparente, tipo fantasma. Porque al final los recuerdos hasta parece que te los imaginas, se ponen borrosos y algunos se pierden.

Come on, little one.” Mikhail’s voice wrapped her in a black-velvet caress. He reached into the glass shower, turned off the water, shackled her wrist, and pulled her from the safety of the large stall. When she shivered, he enveloped her slender body in a towel. Raven wrung out her long hair, a blush stealing over her entire body. Mikhail was so comfortable, unconcerned with his nudity. There was something untamed and magnificent about his raw strength, the casual way he accepted it. He rubbed her body with a large bath towel, buffing her skin until she was warm and rosy. The towel brushed her sensitive nipples, lingered along her rounded bottom, delved in the crease of her hip. Despite her resolve, her body came alive under his ministrations. Mikhail cupped her face, bent to brush his mouth against hers, featherlight, enticing. “Come back to bed,” he whispered against her soft lips, his tongue tasting the satin finish as he led her back to the bedchamber. “Mikhail,” she protested softly, breathlessly. He tugged on her wrist, unbalanced her so that her body came up against him. Her body melted into his, soft breasts pushing against heavy muscle, the evidence of his desire pressing against her stomach. His thighs were two strong columns welded with hers. “I could love you all night, Raven,” he murmured enticingly against her throat. His hands moved over her body, leaving fire in their wake. “I want to love you all night.

Her hands pressed warm against the glass as her gaze swept the scene below: cream and pink roses, petals shining as if they'd been buffed; precious peaches clinging to the sheltered garden wall; the long silver lake gleaming in the mid-morning light. The whole estate had already been preened and primped to a state of impossible perfection, and yet there was still bustle everywhere.

What do you metrosexuals do to prepare for hot dates? Don’t you need to wax something or prune something? Before you get your nails buffed, you can drop me off at my grandmother’s.

I know people who watch CNN all day, particularly when working out on the StairMaster, buffing their butts while those headlines of disaster slap them in the face with an up-to-the-minute report on another high school shooting. You can see a lip-lubed anchor woman running over to an injured cheerleader, shoving the microphone in her face demanding, ‘How do you feel about the incident?’ giving her a little kick as she sinks into unconsciousness. ‘How do you feel?’ She has the look of a cat before it kills a mouse as she turns to the camera and says, ‘Well, Jerry, that’s all on the up-to-the-minute report on the tragedy happening down here, back to you.

blowing on her fingernails and buffing them on the front of her dress, a brief ritual from out of Willow’s teens, indicating prowess.

stop to check my reflection in the full-length mirror. Sometimes I am scared by how beautiful I am. Every inch of me is buffed and primed. My face hangs exactly right. My muscles are taut and organized. I am scared because I don’t want to lose it: the shaped nails, the tip of my nose, the sapphire glow of my eyes.

He had given in to the idea that because he’d once been lonely and lost, he always would be. He’d believed that love was for fools who couldn’t see the inevitable ending. That hope was always going to die, spitted on someone’s sword. But the tales he’d told himself weren’t just wrong—they were dangerously wrong. They were pain and fear buffed to shine until they glittered like truth.

Thuy couldn’t stand cigarettes, the smell, the cancer-causing chemicals, the way they yellowed nails so badly that no amount of buffing could whip them back into a healthy-looking state.

As Rumi once said, “Oh ye who can’t take a good rub. How will you ever become a polished gem?” So, allow yourself to get buffed by the roughness of life, with all the flawed and fallible humans who surround you on the journey. Because then, and only then, can you go out there and shine for all the world to see.

Stairs are sturdy, but need to be sanded and buffed up.” He led her up, and she imagined paint on the walls,

Dad had always composed his daily look carefully: neatly combed hair, seasonal tie featuring pumpkins in October or flags in July, dark leather loafers buffed to a high shine, white doctor’s coat laundered in hot water and pressed crisp. True, he also mowed the lawn in black knee socks and khaki shorts. I’m not saying he always made good choices, just that the outfits, like other decisions, had always been his to make.

Do you like that? Do you enjoy me?" he asked often. And she said yes, which was true, but she sensed that he did not always believe her, or that his belief lasted only so long before he would need to hear her affirmation again. There was something in him, lighter than ego but darker than insecurity, that needed constant buffing, polishing, waxing.

Six months later, though I still loathed the man, I changed my approach to the task list. I got up after the first wake-up call without delay. There would be no more early-morning baptisms for me. Instead, I focused on the details Sgt. Jack always noticed and finished each job right the first time. That was the only way I’d get any free time to play basketball. However, my new approach produced an unexpected side effect as well: a sense of pride in a job well done. In fact, that sense of pride came to mean more to me than basketball time. When I washed his car collection, a weekly assignment, I knew every drop of water had to be wiped away with a chamois before the first coat of wax. I used SOS pads to get the white walls gleaming and buffed the hell out of every panel. I also used Armor All on the dashboards and all the vinyl insides. I buffed the leather seats too. It bothered me if I saw streaks on the glass or chrome. I was annoyed if I missed a soiled spot or cut a corner here or there on any chore. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was a sign that I was actually healing. When a half-assed job doesn’t bother you, it speaks volumes about the kind of person you are. And until you start feeling a sense of pride and self-respect in the work you do, no matter how small or overlooked those jobs might be, you will continue to half-ass your life. I knew I had every reason in the world to rebel and remain a lazy motherfucker. I also sensed that would only make me more miserable, so I adapted. But no matter how well I did or how fast I completed a given task, there were no atta’ boys or weekly allowance. No ice cream cones or surprise gifts, hugs, or high fives. In Sgt. Jack’s mind, I was finally doing what I should have been doing all along.

I was a case study in teenage intransigence. I held an ironclad, steel-buffed, pathologically derived and empirically valid hole card: the ability to withdraw and inhabit a world of my own mental making. Friendship meant minor indignities. Raucous laughs with the guys meant assuming a subservient role. The cost felt negligible. I knew how to reap profit from estrangement. I didn’t know that costs accrue. I didn’t know that you always pay for what you suppress.

Well, but I shaved carefully and put on a white shirt and buffed my shoes a little, and so on. I think such preparations can be the difference between an elderly gentleman and a codger. I know the former is a more suitable consort for your lovely mother, but sometimes I forget to go to the necessary trouble, and that’s an error I mean to correct.

You think women are just buffed and polished naturally? It takes time and money to look like this.

Iti faci uneori multe idei despre cineva, pentru ca, deodata, o simpla propozitie sa distruga totul. Foarte trist, intr-adevar. Ai zice ca lumea se inversuneaza sa nu ma lase sa iubesc pe nimeni din jur, oricare ar fi acela. De cum incep sa ma atasez de cineva, buf! ma si trezesc cu o galeata cu apa rece pe cap!

When he opens his eyes again, they catch sight of a neighbor watching from the far side of the privacy pines. The man is buffing a vintage MG and pauses to give a soldier’s salute.

SOLUTION: Make it a habit to give your jacket a quick cleaning every time you eat a banana. Leave the banana peel out to dry overnight. When ready, rub the inside of the peel against the surface of the leather. Follow up by buffing the jacket with the outside surface of the peel for a finishing polish. WHY THIS WORKS: The average banana peel contains 30 to 40 percent tannin, the stuff used in commercial leather cleaners. When dried, the peel makes a natural leather cleaner, and the outside of the banana peel contains wax, giving leather a perfect top coat. -HOW TO- KEEP YOUR SHIRT CLEAN

Yet, as Brandon explained with a mixture of bitterness and regret, college proved to be the start of a long series of disappointments. Unable to pass calculus or physics, he switched his major from engineering to criminal justice. Still optimistic, he applied to several police departments upon graduation, excited about a future of “catching crooks.” The first department used a bewildering lottery system for hiring, and he didn’t make the cut. The second informed him that he had failed a mandatory spelling test (“I had a degree!”) and refused to consider his application. Finally, he became “completely turned off to this idea” when the third department disqualified him because of a minor incident in college in which he and his roommate “borrowed” a school-owned buffing machine as a harmless prank. Because he “could have been charged with a felony,” the department informed him, he was ineligible for police duty. Regrettably, his college had no record of the incident. Brandon had volunteered the information out of a desire to illustrate his honest and upstanding character and improve his odds of getting the job. With “two dreams deferred,”2 Brandon took a job as the nightshift manager of a clothing chain, hoping it would be temporary. Eleven years later, he describes his typical day, which consists of unloading shipments, steaming and pricing garments, and restocking the floor, as “not challenging at all. I don’t get to solve problems or be creative. I don’t get to work with numbers, and I am a numbers guy. I basically babysit a team and deal with personnel.” When his loans came out of deferment, he couldn’t afford the monthly payments and decided to get a master’s degree—partly to increase his earning potential and partly to put his loans back into deferment. After all, it had been “hammered into his head” that higher education was the key to success. He put on twenty-five pounds while working and going to school full-time for three years. He finally earned a master’s degree in government, paid for with more loans from “that mean lady Sallie Mae.”3 So far, Brandon has still not found a job that will pay him enough to cover his monthly loan and living expenses. He has managed to keep the loans in deferment by continually consolidating—a strategy that costs him $5,000 a year in interest. Taking

His domed head was perfectly buffed and polished, cleanly reflecting the halogen lighting above.

Under Kate’s tireless and frankly intrusive instruction, my legs and underarms are shaved to perfection, my eyebrows plucked, and I am buffed all over.

Gorbachev, the charming and sophisticated world statesman, can turn the air blue with his profanity. Yeltsin, the hard-drinking, backwoods Siberian, regarded as a buf foon in many international circles, never uses swear words and intensely dislikes those who do.

With a groan I let her pull me out of bed and set off for the shower. I have been thoroughly waxed, buffed, shaved, tweaked, and generally molested by beautifying products by the time we hear Greg’s knock on the door. Just in time for him to sit back and enjoy the freak show.

George took her arm again, walking across the sidewalk to his car. He opened the car door for her and once she was inside, he leaned down to smile through the glass. And once inside himself, he took the wheel and told her without prompting that they were going to a steak house downtown that a friend had recommended. His hands on the steering wheel were short and clean and it slowly dawned on her that his fingernails were buffed, perhaps even manicured. She looked at his ear, under the brim of his hat. Sometime since this afternoon, he’d stopped for a haircut, too. The thought flattered her, even made her shy as he talked about this pal of his who knew from steak houses and fish markets, a connoisseur of mushrooms and artichokes who actually ordered cheese for dessert, his tastes were so refined. He took his eyes from the road for a minute to look at her, smiling again, laughing as he spoke, being charming even as she, smiling back at him, found herself growing demure.

Swords, shields, daggers and ninja stars flew all over the place as our two armies fought near the middle of the battlefield. Our front line of guards was fully buffed, so they charged in quickly with their shields. The archers and rogues stayed behind our shield bearers and launched their projectiles. The enemy ninjas and thieves bounced and jumped everywhere as they dodged our arrows and daggers. A group of Team Scorpion rogues started to stack blocks of dirt to make columns again, but this time, they made really, really tall columns. Our ballistae shot down the columns as they went up, but Team Scorpion built them back up immediately, and they doubled up the columns to resist our ballistae. Once the new structures were completed, the enemy took cover behind it and waited for our guards to arrive.

Eh, I’d give him a solid six. At least he didn’t rub my clit raw like the rest of them. I don’t understand why they think they have to treat it like they’re buffing out a scratch on their car. It’s sensitive. Fucking take it easy, DJ Scribble.

General-purpose or terry: Perfect for general-purpose cleaning, such as dusting, wiping, etc. Get a few, to avoid cross-contamination. I recommend five of these. Plush: Perfect for buffing surfaces to a streak-free shine. Stash one with you when cleaning for this purpose. Have two on hand. Flat-weave: Used for glass cleaning and delicate, soft surfaces such as flat-screen TVs and electronics. I use one or two for a home cleaning. Waffle-weave: Heavy-duty drying towels designed to replace dish towels. A pair of these is perfect in the kitchen.

he used some Prime Grade A boogers to make it too. It was shiny too. I could tell he spent a lot of time buffing it up real nice. “We’re here! Grandma and Grandpa’s house!” Dad said. Grandma and Grandpa Zombie are really cool. They’ve been around a really long time. I like coming to Grandma and Grandpa’s house because they always give me and Wesley the coolest presents.

Those loves have gone beyond now, rocketed off to Antares while you were buffing your table with beeswax polish to get some glow back to your life, make it mean something because that’s the fear, isn’t it, all this time on the cloud-swathed earth that you haven’t done what you were meant to, some large and noble design you’ve occasionally caught glimpses of, and lost.

She wasn't manipulating me, not really. No, Gemma was upfront from the start about wanting to make me over for work. I’m the one who happily signed up to all the buffing and puffing and wax. And sure, she didn’t tell me about the contest, but would that have really changed anything? If she’d told me from the start, what would my reaction have been? Amusement, probably. I would have had a good laugh about it, and then helped her figure out a way to beat that bitch Arielle into the dirt. So why do I feel so shitty, when all the pieces add up to make sense? Because of Lisa. I let out a sigh.

Every inch of her body had been buffed, moisturized, botoxed, colored, manicured, pedicured, stretched, sculpted, lasered, massaged, tightened, trimmed, whitened, or some combination of all of the above.

We’re diamonds: “Some are in the rough, though; others already buffed to a nice glow.” To shine, wait for no one to give you glow, lest you’re in the tropics waiting for snow. Yet, if you do choose to polish yourself, see that you have the will to drive yourself. For if you don’t have the will to do so, just the same—you’re also waiting for snow!

For years, we knew the double-storey at the bottom of Albermarle Street as the Gandhi House. In the decade before the Great War, we'd been told, Gandhi lived here with his family. Now the house has lost its claim on history 9but not its plaque from the National Monuments Council). An enterprising researcher, with nothing to gain by his unmasking except the truth, has shown that Gandhi did not live here after all, but up the road at No. 11. One of Gandhi's descendants, who visited the house as a child, has provided confirmation. The people at No. 11 should have that plaque moved to their wall. Both the Gandhi Houses, the true and the false, are double-storeys set on a promontory between two thoroughfares, but the attitudes of the streets could not differ more. Hillier and Albermarle Streets approach the impostor rather Kindly, cupping it in leafy palms, whereas Albermarle and Johannes grip the genuine article like an egg in a nutcracker. No. 11 has a handsome corrugated-iron roof and a wide, shady balcony. I recall an orante wrought-iron finial, the ECG of a Victorian heartbeat, dancing along the roof ridge, but it must have been removed by the renovators. I cannot remember ever seeing a person on the balcony, perfectly suited though it is to reading the paper or chatting over sundowners, but for a few years there were shop-window mannequins leaning on the parapet. Perhaps they were scarecrows for thieves? At night, with the lighted windows behind them, they always deceived the eye. Something in the atmosphere, a bit of lace around the neck, a reddish tinge of the light from the doorway, made them look like whores. Apparently, the Mahatma used to take his rest on the balcony on summer nights. It is easy to picture him there with sleep in his eyes, buffing his little round glasses on the hem of a bed sheet.

Driving to Work is a Spiritual Experience The sun rises in shades of tuna I can only hear One song See the trucks moving Like ribbon around me It's me and this machine Somewhere are the bodies I've put my mouth on When I am old And held in I hope words Will be lusterless I want to be Buffed so hard that even The highway Can't scratch When I get to school One kid reads a piece About how he wants to give Relationship Advice For a living He says that a cheater Will always cheat, and of course, He wants to find a way To make us learn this The other day when locking My house I had A vision of a field Behind it were three Smaller fields I can leave many times And still not be Gone

Anne nodded in understanding. “That definitely makes more sense. Rys, would you mind explaining why you are looking at me like I am sitting here preening my wings and buffing my halo?

generally perfectly okay for most other folks. When a lie has negative consequences, people dislike it. But otherwise? They move on, and eventually the lie as a lie is forgotten, or in this case, codified as the foundation of religious practice and buffed and sanded into something prettier and more congenial.

It was ash on fingertips, and vast. Stepping upon it gave the impression that it had come not from below, buffed by millions of years of wind slicing against rock, but rather from above; that perhaps it had drifted down and settled here. The layers undulated from an inch to hundreds of feet thick. Red storms swept and swirled, colouring the atmosphere with grains so light it took days until the air became clear again: shifting from bloodshot and murky to a jaundiced yellow, the sepia sun somewhere above the thick cloud-layer.

If I were fully conscious of my surroundings at this moment, I would describe the light through the window, the way it searches out the apples in the glass bowl, buffing them to an unnatural sheen. I bought them for their fragrance, not their freshness, so even if you were to close your eyes, you'd know you were in the presence of apples. You would smell the heavy softening, the sweet rotting where apple ends and cider begins.

I was looking down at a little sprig of mahonia growing out of the turf, its oxblood leaves like buffed pigskin.

Human beings are curators. Each polishes his or her own favoured memories, arranging them in order to create a narrative that pleases. Some events are repaired and buffed for display; others are deemed unworthy and cast aside, shelved below ground in the overflowing storeroom of the mind. There, with any luck, they are promptly forgotten. The process is not dishonest: it is the only way that people can live with themselves and the weight of their experiences

Human beings are curators. Each polishes his or her own favored memories, arranging them in order to create a narrative that pleases. Some events are repaired and buffed for display; others are deemed unworthy and cast aside, shelved belowground in the overflowing storeroom of the mind.

The nicest building in Patrice’s life was Lena’s Food Market off Fond Du Lac Avenue. It had shopping carts, bright fluorescent lights, and a buffed linoleum floor. Her white friends called it the ghetto grocery store, but it was one of the better markets on the North Side. And at Lena’s, Patrice never felt her existence questioned. She tried not to go to parts of the city where she did. Patrice lived four miles away from the shore of Lake Michigan: an hour on foot, a half hour by bus, fifteen minutes by car. She had never been.

However, I’ve always had the sense that the muse of the tormented artist—while the artist himself is throwing temper tantrums—is sitting quietly in a corner of the studio, buffing its fingernails, patiently waiting for the guy to calm down and sober up so everyone can get back to work.

You’d better show me how you pleasure yourself,” he said, trying for the tone one uses when buffing one’s fingernails on one’s lapels and instead landing on something like a dying man’s prayer.

After I’d posted on my blog, we spent the next two days cleaning up the hotel. The workers had quit for the weekend (it was the weekend), and the Sociologist, João, and I picked up where they’d left off. We concentrated on the ballroom: first, we patched and painted. When we were done with that we scrubbed the floor of its last carpet remnants, buffed it with the power buffer. When we were done with that João went out and came back with a long buffet table, and on it he put a pair of speakers and, in between the pair of speakers, a CD player and a receiver. When we were done it looked like a room that had seen too many parties but was somewhat recovered and ready for another one.

Her flaws were in plain sight, not buffed out with salt scrubs or hidden under layers of Mary Kay.

time heals all wounds, as they say.” She barely held back a cringe. She hated that saying, and it wasn’t even true. In fact, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Time buffed away the raw edges, yes, but underneath those edges were layers of what-ifs and what-could-have-beens, and they were as rough as sandpaper. If you rubbed against them too hard and too often, you would make yourself raw. You would bleed.

your shiny shoes perfectly polished, like seven kindly dwarves had neatly buffed them at dawn.