Neat Nails Quotes

Barrons knows virtually everything about me. I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere he has a little file that encompasses my entire life to date, with neatly mounted, acerbically captioned photos—see Mac sunbathe, see Mac paint her nails, see Mac almost die.

A Good Relationship is like a neat and defined nail art. It requires a lot of concentration, time devotion and patience, to take it to perfection!

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans. And then one day, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl, sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realised what it was that had been going wrong all this time and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no-one would have to get nalied to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass and so the idea was lost forever.

Dolor I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight, All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage, Desolation in immaculate public places, Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard, The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher, Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma, Endless duplicaton of lives and objects. And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions, Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica, Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium, Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows, Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces.

His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others—Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She’d be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they’d be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They’d come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they’d walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man’s-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they’d simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself.

She watched his pale, square hands on the map, the short almost stubby fingers, with their neatly trimmed nails and a sparse scattering of fine black hairs on the bottom section of each finger. Appalled, she felt a stirring of desire. You're pathetic as an adolescent, she savagely chided herself. Like a teenager who fancies the first teacher who says anything nice about your work. Grow up, Jordan!

Samantha Jennings sat next to him. Teachers thought Samantha was fantastic: always volunteering for stuff, neat uniform, glossed nails. She did all her diagrams with three different colored pens and covered her textbooks in wrapping paper so they looked extra smart. But

Every sun creates a shadow and not all are blest to stand in the light. We have returned, he tells himself. Minim looks down at his slender fingers, the nails still neatly filed and short. He glances down at his feet, and lays a hand on the beard he learned to trim as well as any royal barber. Every day, he will grow back into himself until he can be who he is: a man who was once everything to everyone, then was reborn again to be nothing.

​Love yourself more. ​Was that made to be an insult? I did love myself, didn’t I? I showered, I made my bed, I cut my nails and did my hair. My skin was always washed, my clothes neat and pressed. If I didn’t love myself, those chores wouldn’t get done.

Whenever he was reminded that life was a losing battle to entropy, what with light-bulbs flickering and horseshoes and nails shuffling out of neat order the moment he turned his back, he was also reminded that humor and a cheerful disposition were the only known antidotes.

Oh, she had been some kind of fine-looking, all right, with that dynamite body and that gorgeous fall of red wavy hair. But she was weak . . . weak somehow. It was as if she was sending out radio signals which only he could receive. You could point to certain things—how much she smoked (but he had almost cured her of that), the restless way her eyes moved, never quite meeting the eyes of whoever was talking to her, only touching them from time to time and then leaping nimbly away; her habit of lightly rubbing her elbows when she was nervous; the look of her fingernails, which were kept neat but brutally short. Tom noticed this latter the first time he met her. She picked up her glass of white wine, he saw her nails, and thought: She keeps them short like that because she bites them. Lions may not think, at least not the way people think . . . but they see. And when antelopes start away from a waterhole, alerted by that dusty-rug scent of approaching death, the cats can observe which one falls to the rear of the pack, maybe because it has a lame leg, maybe because it is just naturally slower . . . or maybe because its sense of danger is less developed. And it might even be possible that

Holly paused, looking down at her hands. The nails were unpolished, but quite neat; she had quit chewing them, just as she had quit smoking. Broken herself of the habit. She sometimes thought that her pilgrimage to something at least approximating mental stability (if not genuine mental health) had been marked by the ritual casting off of bad habits. It had been hard to let them go. They were

So when the displays were erected it came as something of a surprise to discover that the American section was an outpost of wizardry and wonder. Nearly all the American machines did things that the world earnestly wished machines to do—stamp out nails, cut stone, mold candles—but with a neatness, dispatch, and tireless reliability that left other nations blinking. Elias Howe’s sewing machine dazzled the ladies and held out the impossible promise that one of the great drudge pastimes of domestic life could actually be made exciting and fun. Cyrus McCormick displayed a reaper that could do the work of forty men—a claim so improbably bold that almost no one believed it until the reaper was taken out to a farm in the Home Counties and shown to do all that it promised it could. Most exciting of all was Samuel Colt’s repeat-action revolver, which was not only marvelously lethal but made from interchangeable parts, a method of manufacture so distinctive that it became known as “the American system.

FROM A DISTANCE the porter camp looked neat and prosperous, but as we got closer it became clear that it was neither. It seemed that everything in it was made out of castoffs—as if the porters hung around after the climbing season and collected the leftovers from our camp and put it in theirs. There were a couple of shacks that had more flattened tin cans nailed to them than wood. The tents were sewn together from bits and pieces of other tents. The yak halters were made from frayed climbing ropes. The

It seemed so easy for so many people to divide war from peace, to confine their definitions to the unambivalent. Marching soldiers, pitched battles and slaughter. Locked armouries, treaties, fêtes and city gates opened wide. But Fiddler knew that suffering thrived in both realms of existence – he’d witnessed too many faces of the poor, ancient crones and babes in a mother’s arms, figures lying motionless on the roadside or in the gutters of streets – where the sewage flowed unceasing like rivers gathering their spent souls. And he had come to a conviction, lodged like an iron nail in his heart, and with its burning, searing realization, he could no longer look upon things the way he used to, he could no longer walk and see what he saw with a neatly partitioned mind, replete with its host of judgements – that critical act of moral relativity – this is less, that is more. The truth in his heart was this: he no longer believed in peace. It did not exist except as an ideal to which endless lofty words paid service, a litany offering up the delusion that the absence of overt violence was sufficient in itself, was proof that one was better than the other. There was no dichotomy between war and peace – no true opposition except in their particular expressions of a ubiquitous inequity. Suffering was all-pervasive. Children starved at the feet of wealthy lords no matter how secure and unchallenged their rule.

The fact is, nobody would have known from looking. An outsider walking past my cubicle that morning would have seen a petite woman of thirty-four with long, light brown hair pulled back in a barrette, neat and orderly-looking. Closer inspection would have suggested a perfectionistic, polished exterior, a careful attention to detail: a young woman with well-manicured nails and black leggings and Italian shoes; a daily list of things to do sitting on the desk, written in perfect print, several items already neatly ticked off; a workspace so compulsively tidy that one of my staff writers used to say you could fly a plane over my desk and it would look like a map of the Midwest, everything at perfect right angles. Colleagues saw me as smart and introspective, a little reserved maybe, and a paragon of efficiency at work: organized, professional, productive.

He paused and eyed her as if she were an agate discovered in gravel. "But what a very sharp tongue you have for a housekeeper." Bridget's heart sank- she knew better than to speak so frankly. It was never good for a servant to be noticed by a master- particularly this master. "Come." He beckoned her closer with his forefinger and she saw the flash of a jeweled gold ring on his left thumb. She swallowed and opened her right hand, silently dropping the miniature to the lush carpet. As she walked toward him she nudged the little painting under the enormous bed with the side of her foot. She stopped a pace away from him. His lips curved, sly and sensual. "Closer." She stepped nearer until her plain, practical black linsey-woolsey skirts were crushed against his purple velvet knees. Her heart beat hard and swift, but she was confident her expression didn't show her fear. Still smiling, he held out his hands, palms upward. His hands were long-fingered and elegant. The hands of a musician- or a swordsman. She stared down at them a moment, confused. He quirked an eyebrow and nodded. Bridget placed her hands on top of his. Palm to palm. She expected searing heat or deathly cold and was a little surprised to instead feel human warmth. She'd been hired little more than a fortnight before the duke had supposedly been banished. In that time he had never struck her as human- or humane. "Ah," His Grace murmured, cocking his head with interest. "What feminine hands you have, despite your station in life." His blue eyes flashed at her from under dark eyelashes, a secretive smile playing about his mouth. She met his gaze stonily. His lips quirked and he looked down again. "Small, plump, with neat, round nails." He turned her hands over so that they now rested palms-up in his. "I once knew a Greek girl who swore she could read a man's life story from the lines on his hands." He dropped her left hand to trace the lines on her right palm with a forefinger. His touch sent a frisson along her nerves and Bridget couldn't hold back a shudder.

A throat cleared. “Earth to Arik. Come in, boss.” With brows drawn, Arik glared at his beta. “What?” “I was asking what had your boxers in a knot.” “You know I go commando.” “Usually, but something obviously has your panties in a twist. Spill.” Oh, he spilled all right. Arik yanked off the hat and flung it against the wall and then swiveled his chair to get it over with. Indrawn breath. A snicker. A full-on guffaw. Arik swirled again and tossed deadly visual daggers at his second. “I fail to see the humor in my butchered mane.” “Dude. Have you seen it? It is bad. What did you do to piss Dominic off? Seduce one of his daughters?” “Actually one of his granddaughters did this to me!” He couldn’t help the incredulous note. The effrontery of the act still got to him. A thump and a shake of the wall as Hayder hit it, his shoulders shaking with laughter. “A girl did that to you?” His beta convulsed with mirth, not at all daunted by Arik’s glower and tapping fingers. “This is not amusing.” “Oh, come on, dude. Of all the people to have a hair mishap, you are the worst.” “I look like an idiot.” “Only because you didn’t let her finish hacking the rest off.” His fingers froze as he took his gaze off the screen for a moment to address the travesty. “Cut off my mane?” Was his beta delusional? “Well, yeah. You know, to even it out so it doesn’t show.” A growl rumbled forth, more beast than man, his lion not at all on board with any more trimming. “Okay, if you’re not keen on that, then what about a hair weave? Maybe we could get you a platinum one, or pink for contrast since you’re being such a prissy princess about it.” That did it. A lion could take only so much. Arik dove over his desk and tackled his beta. Over they went with a thump and a tangle of limbs. As he was slamming Hayder’s head off the floor, snarling, “Take it back!” to his beta’s chortled, “We’ll get your nails done while they’re weaving,” Leo strode in. A giant of a man, he didn’t even have to strain as he grabbed them each by a shoulder and yanked them apart. But he didn’t stop there. He slammed their heads together before shoving them down. Arik and Hayder sat on the carpeted floor, nursing robin’s eggs, united in their glare for the pride’s omega, also known as the peacemaker. Of course, Leo’s version of peace wasn’t always gentle, which was why he was perfect for the pride. The behemoth with the mellow outlook on life took a seat in a chair, which groaned ominously. “You do know that the staff two floors down can hear the pair of you acting like ill-behaved cubs.” “He started it!” Arik stabbed a finger at his beta. He had no problem assigning blame. Delegation was something an alpha did well. Hayder didn’t even deny his guilt. “I did. But can you blame me? He was pissing and moaning about this precious mane. All I did was offer a solution, and he took offense.” “I assume we’re talking about the missing chunk of hair on our esteemed leader’s head?” Leo shook his neatly trimmed dark crown. “I keep telling you that vanity is your weakness.” “And chocolate chip ice cream is yours. We all have our vices,” Arik grumbled as he heaved himself off the floor and into his leather-padded seat— with built-in heating pad and massager because a man in his position did enjoy his luxuries. “My vice is beautiful women,” Hayder announced with a grin, adopting a lounging pose on the floor. Felines were king when it came to acting as if embarrassing positions weren’t accidental at all. “Don’t talk to me about women right now. I’m still angry at the one who did this.” “I think I’m missing a key point,” Leo stated. It didn’t take long to bring Leo up to speed. To his credit, the pride omega didn’t laugh— long.

He crossed to the small guard station and foraged through its drawers until he found the first-aid box. He threw bottles over his shoulder and they shattered on the ground behind him. When he came to the procaine hydrochloride vial, he stopped. The Maingate physician had insisted it be present in case emergency oral surgery were ever necessary for the guards; in addition to being a contained security unit, the Tower had to be a self-sufficient medical station. Allander withdrew a needle from the small packet and fit it gently into a plastic syringe. He punched the needle through the rubber top of the vial and withdrew some of the liquid, then cleared the air from the syringe. A few drops squirted through, onto the floor. Taking a deep breath, Allander inserted the needle into the tip of the ring finger on his left hand. He waited for the numbness to spread and settle. After a few minutes, he removed a scalpel from its sterile package and dipped it in the container of alcohol. Then he made a neat incision, cutting diagonally through his fingerprint. Since the anesthetic had not fully taken effect, he felt a painful tingling in the pad of his finger, but feeling suddenly rushed for time, he continued. Using tweezers, he pried underneath the skin, grimacing as he saw his flesh rise along the straight line of the cut. The blood came and washed over the end of the tweezers until it obscured his view. Once, he felt the tweezers close on something hard and he pulled gently, but when the tweezers emerged from the bloody gash, they held only fleshy material that looked like gristle. Allander hadn’t anticipated that numbing the finger would have made it difficult for him to distinguish the location sensor from his own senseless tissue. Beginning to lose patience, he pressed the tweezers in until they hit the bone. He applied too much pressure and they slid around the side of his finger next to his nail, pulling the flesh around and stretching the cut open. He heard a soft, metallic clink as the tweezers struck something distinctly alien, and he bit his lip in a mixture of pain and delight. Finally, working the tweezers around the metal, he withdrew the sensor, which was the size of a large pea. The flesh around the cut strained and whitened at the edges as he pulled the bloody orb through. After pressing gauze to his wound, Allander wrapped it with medical tape, bandaging it thoroughly. Then he used the tape to affix the location sensor to the side of the Hole. It was close enough to its assigned location that the difference in position would not be detected from the mainland.

another Diet Dr Pepper? Wait, what? I was torn from my pirate fantasy by the nasal, weenie voice of Richard Harrison, CPA. “Can I get another Diet Dr Pepper, please? And for the lady, another—what was it you’re having, Viv?” “Scotch. Water. Neat.” I answered, looking across the table at the latest in a long line of blind dates. Set up by my mother, which should have been my first clue to say no and run screaming into that good night. Not that she didn’t have good taste; she’d picked a looker with Richard. Strike that—he was a looker if that’s what you were in to. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Brown chinos, perfectly creased. White button-down. White teeth. Blindingly white, actually; I was pretty sure when he smiled chimes went off. Every time a CPA smiled, a fairy got its wings? Jesus, Viv, get a grip. I sipped my Scotch, wincing not only at the good burn, but at the bad turn this conversation was taking. Tax laws over appetizers. Nothing like a little burrata caprese with a side of capital gains. I’d gotten through the first twenty minutes of Current Bad Date by letting my mind

He was twenty-two years old, his skin the colour of weak coffee with plenty of milk. He had soft brown eyes that belonged more to a lovesick spaniel than the tried and tested assassin he was. His beard was long and bushy but his nails were neatly clipped and glistened as if they had been varnished. Around his head was a knotted black scarf with the white insignia of Islamic State, the caliphate that claimed authority over all Muslims around the world. His weapon was lying on a sandbag

A bird's nest. Mark it well, within, without, No tool had he that wrought, no knife to cut, No nail to fix, no bodkin to insert, No glue to join; his little beak was all. And yet how neatly finish'd! What nice hand, With every implement and means of art, And twenty years' apprenticeship to boot, Could make me such another?

But here I am, having worked so hard and for so long that I’ve made myself sick. And worst of all, I’ve nearly forgotten how to rest. I’m tired, inevitably. But it’s more than that. I’m hollowed out. I’m tetchy and irritable, constantly feeling like prey, believing that everything is urgent and that I can never do enough. And my house—my beloved home—has suffered a kind of entropy in which everything has slowly collapsed and broken and worn out, with detritus collecting on every surface and corner, and I have been helpless in the face of it. Since being signed off sick, I’ve been forced to lean back on the sofa and stare at the wreckage for hours at a time, wondering how the hell it got so bad. There’s not a single soothing place left in the house, where you can rest a while without being reminded that something needs to be mended or cleaned. The windows are clouded with the dusty veil of a hundred rainstorms. The varnish is wearing from the floorboards. The walls are dotted with nails that are missing their pictures or holes that should be filled and painted over. Even the television hangs at a drunken angle. When I stand on a chair and empty the top shelf in the wardrobe, I find that I have meant to replace the bedroom curtains at least three times in the last few years, and every bundle of fabric I’ve bought has ended up folded neatly and stowed away, entirely forgotten. That I’m noticing these things only now that I’m physically unable to remedy them feels like the kind of exquisite torture devised by vengeful Greek gods. But here it is: my winter. It’s an open invitation to transition into a more sustainable life and to wrest back control over the chaos I’ve created. It’s a moment when I have to step into solitude and contemplation. It’s also a moment when I have to walk away from old alliances, to let the strings of some friendships fall loose, if only for a while. It’s a path I’ve walked over and over again in my life. I have learned the skill set of wintering the hard way.

MEN WHO BELIEVE THAT THEY ARE ACCOMPLISHING something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. Bobby Shaftoe has learned most of his practical knowledge—how to fix a car, butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip—from the latter type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can even see the desperation spread over such a man’s face as he listens to himself speak. Men of the other type—the ones who use speech as a tool of their work, who are confident and fluent—aren’t necessarily more intelligent, or even more educated. It took Shaftoe a long time to figure that out. Anyway, everything was neat and tidy in Bobby Shaftoe’s mind until he met two of the men in Detachment 2702: Enoch Root and Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. He can’t put his finger on what bugs him about those two. During the weeks they spent together on Qwghlm, he spent a lot of time listening to them yammer at each other, and began to suspect that there might be a third category of man, a kind so rare that Shaftoe never met any of them until now.

style, political correctness, and neatness. When you are finished, close your test booklet and sit quietly until everyone is done. Do not gloat at sluggards. Do not pare your nails. You may begin. Write a 500-word essay on any three of the following: Question No. 1 Does that author cheat who ends a story with “ … and it was all a dream”? Discuss what “cheat” could mean in this context.

They looked at Neagley. Dark hair, dark eyes, a tan. A good-looking woman. She smiled at them. Her forearms were on the table. Reacher noticed her nails. They were shiny with clear polish, and neatly filed. Even on the right, which she must have done left-handed. She wouldn’t use a nail salon. She couldn’t bear her hands to be touched. She looked at one guy, and then the other. The

Yes, sir,” the butler agreed as he handed me my boots and a fresh set of clothes. “Lunch is ready in the dining hall.” I nodded shakily before I followed the man down the hall, and I could already tell by the delicious smell that he’d nailed the burger endeavor. The scent of grilled onions and melted cheese wafted through the mansion like a beacon of hope, and I took deep, mouthwatering breaths until I made it to the table. Then I clutched my clothes against my chest as I took in the sight of over a dozen burgers with glistening, buttered buns, two-inch thick patties, and all the fixings packed in so tight, they dripped down the sides. Extra toppings were neatly lined on platters while little bowls of what looked a lot like ketchup and mustard dotted the table, and there was even a frothing mug of ale waiting beside my place setting. “Alfred, how much do I pay you?” I asked. “An exorbitant amount, sir,” the butler assured me. I clapped him on the shoulder. “Double it.” “Certainly, sir.

A man strums a guitar in the background. Luis’s hand is on the stone inches away, his naked fingers long and tapered, his nails neatly trimmed, his skin a few shades darker than mine. Those inches feel like a mile—or ninety.

She tore away the red cellophane strip on the cigarette pack and peeled back the foil. The cancer sticks stood neatly side by side like sardines packed in a tin can. She pulled the first one out with her long nails and slipped it between her lips. With the

Everything was in order, although coated in dust, cobwebs and what looked like an entire village of dead bugs. A pegboard held his saws, chisels, hammers, vises and screwdrivers. He’d used old wooden cigar boxes with tiny knobs screwed to each to construct drawers for a homemade cubby holding a wide assortment of nails, screws, bolts and washers. The power tools were neatly arranged on the wooden shelves beside the bench. An old nail barrel held scraps of lumber. She inhaled deeply. The shed smelled of cigar smoke, WD-40 and sawdust. It smelled like Papi.