Grasp At Straws Quotes

He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.

I lamented to one of them that I felt I was grasping at straws. “My advice? Grasp a straw,” he said. “Work it to dust.

Thanksgiving comes to us out of the prehistoric dimness, universal to all ages and all faiths. At whatever straws we must grasp, there is always a time for gratitude and new beginnings.

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and float on gossamer for deductions.

The Jews proposed the ridiculous story that the guards had fallen asleep. Obviously, they were grasping at straws. But the point is this: they started with the assumption that the tomb was vacant! Why? Because they knew it was!

People think they understand things because they become familiar with them. This is only superficial knowledge. It is the knowledge of the astronomer who knows the names of the stars, the botanist who knows the classification of the leaves and flowers, the artist who knows the aesthetics of green and red. This is not to know nature itself- the earth and sky, green and red. Astronomer, botanist, and artist have done no more than grasp impressions and interpret them, each within the vault of his own mind. The more involved they become with the activity of the intellect, the more they set themselves apart and the more difficult it becomes to live naturally.

You want me to talk about love, to give you a hold, something to feel, to admire or obtain. I will not give you a straw to grasp, and in this emptiness you will be taken by yourself. You are love so don’t try to be a lover.

But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular--especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they're suppose to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place. Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The laws they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug. America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, or urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws.

In the time we spend reeling in confusion, grasping at straws trying to piece our egos together, we forget to acknowledge some things. Society created gender roles and categorizations and lifestyles and names and titles because we fear the unknown, especially when the unknown is us. It’s as though we’re stranded in the middle of an ocean, but we were promised the current would bring us back ashore. We’re given all we need on the life raft. As far as we can see, we’re being led back, slowly. We don’t know when we’ll approach the shore, but all evidence points to the fact that we will. But we don’t spend our time looking around, enjoying the view, seeing who came with us, and riding out the waves. We sit and panic about what we’re doing and why we came here. It doesn’t matter where we started because we may never know. It matters where we’re going, because that, we do. We begin and we end. We’ve seen one, so there’s only one other option.

But…” I’m really grasping at straws, now. “You don’t date,” I remind him, desperate to believe my own words. “You don’t do more.” “That’s true.” Despite myself, I feel my heart deflate like a week-old balloon. “Maybe that’s because I wasn’t doing it with you.

It is the custom on the stage: in all good, murderous melodramas: to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; and, in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger; drawing forth a dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and, just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard: and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle: where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of places from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company, carolling perpetually. Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on; which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous.

when straws are all you have, you grasp them. There

My advice? Grasp a straw,” he said. “Work it to dust.

America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, of urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws.

We even grasp at straws, sometimes, to keep death away from us," he said. "But death is not the enemy. It takes us when our bodies are no longer prepared to carry on in our current lives. Brings us peace and freedom from pain. It is life that is often the enemy. The siren that convinces us to hold onto it as long as we can, even though we are filled with pain or have lived long past our usefulness. My father always said that we should let our life leave us when it is time and do it gladly, instead of with sorrow and bitterness.

I spent that night lying huddled and shivering in the vast bed of the hotel. My feet were icy, my knees drawn up, my head sideways on the pillow; in front of me the arctic waste of starched white bedsheet stretched out to infinity. I knew I could never traverse it, regain the track, get back to where it was warm; I knew I was directionless; I knew I was lost. I would be discovered years later by some intrepid team—fallen in my tracks, one arm outflung as if grasping at straws, my features desiccated, my fingers gnawed by wolves.

This point, where beauty forms the bridge between women and institutions, is what women are taught to seize upon, and is then used as proof that women themselves are finally to blame. But to make herself grasp this straw, a woman has to surpress what she knows: that the powerful ask for women to display themselves in this way.

I'm not the religious type. I believe there's a higher power, but I don't think anyone on earth is truly capable of understanding what that is. I think we all grasp at straws and believe the most convenient lies. Lies that feel comfortable, whether it's ingrained from birth or, like a true rebel, you choose it on your own. It's like those scientists who theorize that there's another dimension, but we can't perceive it because our minds are too limited. We just aren't advanced enough to understand or comprehend the truth. So, God, Buddha, Allah - whatever you want to call him or her - he's not a being. It's a force beyond comprehension. But there's one thing that I do believe: love is as close as we can humanly get to it.

Mostly, they were ashamed of us. Our floppy straw hats and threadbare clothes. Our heavy accents. Every sing oh righ? Our cracked, callused palms. Our deeply lined faces black from years of picking peaches and staking grape plants in the sun. They longed for real fathers with briefcases who went to work in a suit and tie and only mowed the grass on Sundays. They wanted different and better mothers who did not look so worn out. Can't you put on a little lipstick? They dreaded rainy days in the country when we came to pick them up after school in our battered old farm trucks. They never invited over friends to our crowded homes in J-town. We live like beggars. They would not be seen with us at the temple on the Emperor's birthday. They would not celebrate the annual Freeing of the Insects with us at the end of summer in the park. They refused to join hands and dance with us in the streets on the Festival of the Autumnal Equinox. They laughed at us whenever we insisted that they bow to us first thing in the morning and with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp.

Now when he closes his eyes he can really look at himself. He no longer sees a mask. He sees without seeing, to be exact. Vision without sight, a fluid grasp of intangibles: the merging of sight and sound: the heart of the web. Here stream the different personalities which evade the crude contact of the senses; here the overtones of recognition discreetly lap against one another in bright, vibrant harmonies. There is no language employed, no outlines delineated. When a ship founders, it settles slowly; the spars, the masts, the rigging float away. On the ocean floor of death the bleeding hull bedecks itself with jewels; remorselessly the anatomic life begins. What was ship becomes the nameless indestructible. Like ships, men founder time and again. Only memory saves them from complete dispersion. Poets drop their stitches in the loom, straws for drowning men to grasp as they sink into extinction. Ghosts climb back on watery stairs, make imaginary ascents, vertiginous drops, memorize numbers, dates, events, in passing from gas to liquid and back again. There is no brain capable of registering the changing changes. Nothing happens in the brain, except the gradual rust and detrition of the cells. But in the minds, worlds unclassified, undenominated, unassimilated, form, break, unite, dissolve and harmonize ceaselessly. In the mind-world ideas are the indestructible elements which form the jewelled constellations of the interior life. We move within their orbits, freely if we follow their intricate patterns, enslaved or possessed if we try to subjugate them.

There is a moment during a structure fire when you know you are either going to get the upper hand or that it's going to get the upper hand on you. You notice the ceiling patch about to fall and the staircase eating itself alive and the synthetic carpet glued to the soles of your boots. The sum of the parts overwhelms, and that's when you back out and force yourself to remember that every fire will burn itself out, even without your help. These days, I'm fighting fire on six sides. I look in front of me and see Kate sick I look behind me and see Anna with her lawyer. The only time Jesse isn't drinking like a fish, he's strung out on drugs; Sara's grasping at straws. And me, I've got my gear on, safe. I'm holding dozens of hooks and irons and poles-all tools that are meant to destroy, when what I need is something to rope us together.

But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President‡ feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular—especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they’re supposed to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place. Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The laws they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so-called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug. America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, of urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws.

I wasn't sure what to feel. Somewhere within me still blazed my perpetual flame of anger, indignation, and resentment. But deeper than that, there was more. There was abandonment. There was betrayal. There was a hollow sense of grief. For years, I'd been grasping at straws in an attempt to find meaning to my life, purpose to my days. As much as my country had been the cause of my darkest depths of depression, it had also picked me up from them. It had forced me to keep going in some direction, even if it wasn't what I would have chosen for myself. In many ways, being imprisoned had been the best thing that could have happened to me. It had taught me to stop feeling and to simply concentrate on doing. We were worked hard and weren't given time for much else. Days were comfortably numb.

Most people feel that crimes such as murder, rape, incest, and child abuse are morally wrong. But what causes us to have these moral views? Historical approaches to morality have been dominated by “rationalist” theories, whereby people arrive at a moral judgment through moral reasoning (Haidt, 2001, 2012). By logic and rationality, we are presumed to weigh the issues of right and wrong, harm and misdeed, justice and fairness, and arrive at the morally correct answer. Psychologist Jon Haidt has challenged this view, arguing instead that humans have evolved moral emotions that produce quick automatic evaluations. Only subsequently, when we are forced to explain or rationalize our moral stances, do we grasp for the straws of reasoning that we hope will support a judgment we’ve already made.

Most tourists, having done some research on Chicago delicacies, order their Italian beef sandwiches "wet," meaning that a slosh of extra meat gravy is dumped over the beef once it is in the bread. They think it means they are in the know, much as they do when they order a Chicago hot dog and tell the seller to "drag it through the garden." Chicagoans, almost to a person, order their dogs simply with "everything" if they want the seven classic toppings, and their Italian beef "dipped," meaning that the whole sandwich, once assembled, is grasped gently between tongs and completely submerged briefly in the vat of jus. This results in a sandwich that isn't just moist, it's decadently squooshy, in a way that sends rivulets of salty meaty juice down your arm when you eat. This is the sandwich that necessitated the invention of the Chicago Sandwich Stance, a method of eating with your elbows resting on your dining surface, leaning over to hopefully save shirtfronts and ties from a horrible meaty baptism. Dipped Italian beef sandwiches in Chicago require a full commitment. Once you start, you are all in till the last bit of slushy bread and shred of spicy beef is gone. It requires that beverages have straws and proximity. Because if you try to stop midway, to pop in a French fry, or pick up a cup, the whole thing will disintegrate before your very eyes. You can lean over to sip something as long as you don't let go of your grasp on the sandwich. Fries are saved for dessert. Most people wouldn't suspect how good iced coffee would be with Italian beef and French fries, but it is genius. My personal genius. Bringing sweet and bitter and cold to the hot, salty umami bomb of the sandwich and the crispy fries- insanely good.

I wasn’t grasping at straws; I was merely looking for the straw I had misplaced.

Grasping at straws, she nodded to the warrior’s dagger. “There’s a prophecy in my world about my sword and a missing knife. That when they’re reunited, so will the Fae of Midgard be.

Later, a different passion will lead the man to rename the woman, this time without reference to himself. Hearing that the woman will bear children, the only good news in God’s grim prophecy of the dismal human future (sorrow, sweat, toil, and death), he grasps at this straw of hope, renaming the woman Eve (Chavah), because she is the mother of all living (chai). From Adam’s hopefulness, Eve gets the first genuinely proper name in the Bible.

Faust also discusses the belief in salvation as a factor in nerving soldiers to face death with equanimity and as a source of comfort to their families. She cites the funeral sermon for a Massachusetts officer killed at Petersburg, in which the clergyman defined death as “the middle point between two lives.” But she seems inclined at times to view this conviction as the equivalent of grasping at straws—or, to change the metaphor, of whistling past the graveyard. Instead of a deeply held belief, it was for many soldiers and their families, she writes, the product of “distress and desire” to make tolerable the intolerable prospect of death. She also suggests the provocative idea that the vision of death as the middle point between two lives was a nineteenth-century version of a death-denying culture.

In common with the rest of the world she was eager to grasp at any straw which might rehabilitate her dreams.

Cassidy could see through half-closed eyes the unadorned western horizon and in a quirky mind trick he could sense the entire fifty-mile stretch of deep purple Gulf Stream between the tiny wave-skipping boat and the limestone-and-coral Florida peninsula. He could sense as well the huge pelagic fish that moved through the stream deep and shallow and also all the manatees and sunfish and whales as well as all the German submarines and wooden sailing ships and blockade-runners that had plied it in years and centuries past, some bringing Tories, slaves, bricks; others taking guns, drugs, rum; and some dealing death and leaving burning American boys in oily life jackets within sight of straw-boatered dandies strolling the boardwalks at Daytona. In his presleep state he had the sensation of being able to grasp it all at once, as if in a four-dimensional painting encompassing both time and space, his own place in it an inconsequential squiggle of comings and goings.

He stood for a few seconds watching the corpse spasm and shock hit him hard like a punch to the stomach. Fuck! That could have been me, he thought. Mirza grasped his arm, dragging him to his senses. The Indian lectured, “Sir, you can’t always rely on yourself. A single straw is useless, but together, many straws make a broom.” What? Broom? His thoughts muddled, Bishop rubbed at his throat, leaning wearily on the soldier. “Is that the same straw that broke the camel’s back, Mirza?” he croaked. “What are you, a fucking philosopher now?” His words sounded ungrateful but the expression on his face told a different story. “Thanks, mate.

It seemed some pulp-novel version of a European hub, equal parts Renaissance-age Florence and modern day Paris with a heavy helping of Las Vegas and New York—at least, that was the way she thought of it. It was so far beyond description and unrelatable to any other place that she grasped desperately at straws trying to puzzle out how she'd tell the tale she'd no doubt live tonight.

The simple fact is that looking to Jesus for a legitimization of violence is grasping at straws.

Well, I have to see, don’t I? Do you think she’ll like pink roses and sweet peas, Tom?” There was a plaintive helplessness to the last part of the question, as when one grasps at straws.

Most things in the world aren’t dangerous in their own right. It’s when people take those things, use them to further their own agenda, warp them to serve themselves rather than others, that turns something good, decent, or neutral into a devastating force. The entire world was a ticking time bomb. The digital world wasn’t all bad. It was neutral, really. But it also fueled polarization, discontent, and angst. It made things accessible that you used to have to find in dusty tomes, or had to research in libraries or at universities. You don’t need to travel the world to consult an expert any more. A bastardized version of almost any expertise was posted online for all the world to use and abuse. What should have united people, giving us access to information to understand other people, cultures, and worldviews, has instead become bent by the human pathology— the disease of narcissism— to do the opposite. We used the digital sphere to close our minds to anything that challenged our assumptions. People found it easier to congregate among the like- minded. It’s reached a point of absurdity. Rather than consider views that challenge one’s perspective of the world, people search out those who will ratify and confirm their biases. As such, rather than bringing people together, or debating their ideas in the public square, people on either extreme of any situation only grow more polarized, stretching the civilized world like a criminal on a medieval rack. All because everyone’s too damn blind to consider their own error, how they might be wrong, or to critically reconsider their own insecurities and fears. Understanding the other has never been more possible due to the accessibility of information. Anyone who genuinely wants to understand alternate lifestyles or views can do so quite easily— but no one wants to. Because when our idols fail, when our false- gods betray us, it leaves us grasping at straws. Even those like my father, who use religion to serve their own insecurities, and reforge their deity into an idol in their own image— worship at the altar of the unholy trinity of me, myself, and I. That’s always been the state of the world, in truth. Whatever we fear, love, or trust the most. That’s our god. And most people trust “number one” above all else, they prioritize themself over all others, and since they’ve become gods unto themselves, anyone who disagrees with them is no longer viewed as a dignified person with a right to their own opinions and choices. If their opinion contradicted and violated my divine me, then anyone who disagrees with me is by definition a heretic. And the world has only ever had one way of dealing with those they deem heretics. One thing I’ve learned more than anything else over the last century and a half of my existence is that being wrong isn’t a bad thing. We can’t grow at all if we can’t admit our error. We will never advance if we don’t grant ourselves permission to be wrong— if we aren’t thankful for being disproven, that we might evolve, adapt, and grow in our wisdom. That’s what’s crazy about the world. It’s spinning out of control, ready to tear itself apart. All it would take is a simple recognition that it’s okay to be wrong, that it’s a necessary part of life, and a realization that we can all learn something from anyone and everyone else. But we’ve all become zealots in the religion of self. We’re all staunch defenders of our personal dogma. The problem is that we all nod along to those insights— so long as they convict everyone else. While the god of “self” is weak, an idol no more trustworthy than gods of wood or stone, it doesn’t die easily. Who was I to think I could save the world ever? All I’d ever done was delay the inevitable. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t keep trying… I wouldn’t keep fighting. Because when we stop fighting for others we end up stuck in that damned religion of me. And I was never very religious. Why change now?

Throughout these tales it becomes clear that Man was running a race, if not with himself, then with some imagined follower who pressed close upon his heels, breathing on his back. Man was engaged in a mad scramble for power and knowledge, but nowhere is there any hint of what he meant to do with it once he had attained it. He has, according to the legend, come from the caves a million years before. And yet, only a little over a hundred years before the time of this tale, has he been able to eliminate killing as a basic part of his way of life. Here, then, is the true measure of his savagery: After a million years he has rid himself of killing and he regards it as a great accomplishment. To most readers it will be easy, after reading this tale, to accept Rover’s theory that Man is set up deliberately as the antithesis of everything the Dogs stand for, a sort of mythical straw-man, a sociological fable. This is underlined by the recurring evidence of Man’s aimlessness, his constant running hither and yon, his grasping at a way of life which continually eludes him, possibly because he never knows exactly what he wants.

Ditching straws has recently become an environmental cause—but did you know that sucking on straws causes wrinkles? The movement your mouth makes when it grasps the straw encourages the breakdown of collagen and elasticity more quickly, both of which your skin requires for support. As a result, you get unnecessary wrinkles and lines that make you look like you’ve been smoking, even if you haven’t! If you only use a straw once in a while, it’s no big deal. But if you’re sucking your cold brew coffee or

The high brass talk over one another, interjecting and interrupting, theorizing on the fly, and giving the impression of a group of very important people grasping at straws, working to get a handle on an impossible situation.

One must reach the point of “not caring two straws about his own status” before he can wish wholly for God's kingdom, not his own, to be established.' Death to ambition as such will be the beginning of new life. Above all, the part of a man which puts success first must be humiliated if a man is ever to be really free.

Usually when a husband expresses that he doesn’t love his wife, he is making a statement about his own shame. He is grasping at straws and trying to make sense of his own behavior. This particular logic says, “If I am willing to hurt her this badly, over and over again, then I must not love her.” For some guys it’s easier to stomach the explanation of “falling out of love” or “I must not have truly loved her anyway” than

I'm sorry..." He confirmed that he couldn't say a complete sentence and spoke intermittently. "I... when I think of him, I... want to cry." Polly held An Zhe in his arms. "Don't cry, child. Live and you will see him again." "I won't meet him anymore." An Zhe grabbed Polly's arm like he was grasping the last live-saving straw in the stormy sea of emotion. He couldn't stop crying and he finally closed his eyes in a trembling manner, resting his forehead on Polly's shoulder.

..., grasping at straws is the only way to find a needle in a haystack.

Is everything ok?" "I'm getting old and gray trying to keep up with them," John teased with a wink. "Things are fine," Michele said. "We've learned a lot about Bath and pirates and have been swimming a lot, and they have the neatest little library here, but . . ." Michele stopped and slumped down in a heap on the floor by her Mother's feet. ". . . but they haven't found that missing head yet?" Mother finished. "Exactly!" Michele said. "Just finding that stupid old head would solve everything, and I would have a chance to be in a real play before I'm old and gray." "Such ambition!" said Mother. "I was delighted to get published before I was thirty. But I guess your reach should exceed your grasp." "It seems like my grasp has been at straws so far this summer," Michele said. A quizzical two plus-two-equals-four look came over John's face. "Just how hard have you kids been looking for that head?" he asked. "Oh . . ." Michele began, biting her tongue for saying too much. "We've just been keeping our eyes open." "Hm, I think I'd better keep my eyes open," John said, winking at Mother again. "Lash them to the yardarms!" "Now, who's acting," Mother said and laughed.

for a short time, we agreed to have a season of prayer before we left. Before this was decided upon, Bro. Smith remarked that probably the Lord would send me my Pentecost. I was like a man grasping at straws and immediately a ray of hope entered my soul and I said within myself, "Yes, Lord, send Thy Spirit now." Little by little I felt the power fall.

It is always pathetic to watch the efforts a man makes to cling to a straw, especially when one is oneself the straw.

So many in the world today are consumed with artificial desires. We grasp at imaginary straws. We work harder and harder and stress ourselves out to achieve more and more, but to what end? So we can become lawyers and businesspeople? So we can make lots of money to buy a big house or a fancy car but that can’t buy us happiness or health? I saw too much of that misery, which is why I withdrew from that world a long time ago. And it’s also why I began to think, What is the soul? Where is it? Well, I found it first in the cold and then in the breath that followed. There’s nothing mystical or abstract about it. It’s physical. Your breath is your life-force, right here, right now. It could not be any simpler. Just breathe and reclaim your soul.

Detective, this is outrageous. You’re grasping at straws trying to paint my client as some drug kingpin, but you have no proof.” Amir put his hand on my shoulder. “If you’re done insulting Ms. Macapagal and wasting our time, we’d like to leave now.

I have seen disparaging comments on social media toward my fellow African American and Afro-Caribbean people throughout the diaspora. People saying things like, “they’re wearing beauty shop dashikis” or “they’re grasping at straws because they don’t know anything about Africa.” Listen, we get our healing the way we need to. And if I put on a beauty shop dashiki, it’s because that is what I have access to. And I will rock it—proudly—and be connected to my motherland and my Source in the way that my womb energy tells me is connective for me.

If you are terrified of being a bore you probably are a bore and terror should be on its way. But Skizzen had become bored by himself, even alone in the urinal, so what must he be to others? Was terror transferable? He believed it was—contagious, like panic. There were books that argued for it. If you could not hear what you were about to play before you played it; if you could not measure the intervals to come, had no grasp of the constellations that notes and not-notes formed; then fear would fill your fingers as though they were sucking straws. When he faced his first class, he heard his words toddle from his mouth, their sense of conviction tied to a string for handy retraction. He would look in wonder at his notes, “If you could not hear what you were about to play before you played it; if you could not measure the intervals to come, had no grasp of the constellations that notes and not-notes formed; then fear would fill your fingers as though they were sucking straws. When he faced his first class, he heard his words toddle from his mouth, their sense of conviction tied to a string for handy retraction. He would look in wonder at his notes, notes both musical and expository, that suddenly meant nothing to him.