Plunger Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Plunger. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Teddy said it was a hat, So I put it on. Now dad is saying, "where the heck's the toilet plunger gone?
Shel Silverstein
It is a known fact that pain and pleasure are the two most basic elements of life. But the secret is to simplify that fact.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
I dropped out of school and congratulated myself for my diligence. Few realize how hard one has to work to resist the pressures of conventional success.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
Water is very bad for one’s health. People in third world countries seem to drink nothing but water, and they are always dying.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
Advice to Young Poets Never pretend to be a unicorn by sticking a plunger on your head.
Martín Espada
So many things happen that we can't control, its best not to worry about what we can. Believing you can change the world has a terrible effect on one's ego.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
A man is always devoted to something more tangible than a woman - the idea of her.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
Usually I am the only subject I care to discuss with company. But when I'm getting reacquainted with an old friend, I really enjoy just sitting back and listening to them talk about me for a while.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
There are lots of things sons shouldn’t imagine about their mothers, above all what it was like to become one.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
It is so wearisome having to represent things. That is why I refuse to look at abstract art. It is much too suggestive of the style of my thoughts, and I never think about my thoughts.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
I notice, however, that Peter only pretends to inject himself—when he presses the plunger down, the fluid runs down his throat, and he wipes it casually with a sleeve. I wonder what it feels like to volunteer to forget everything.
Veronica Roth (Allegiant (Divergent, #3))
Neighbors are the most indecent sort of folk around. Nothing but voyeurs and gossipers. As a community we would be much better off without them.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
Injuries heal, but wrinkles are the scars of time.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
When it’s not enough to veto your children’s tendencies, you must in vitro them.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
A man without debts is a man without anything to live for. Debt is collateral for life. It provides you with obligations to others, gives you duty, gives you purpose: the purpose to protect those possessions which you would not otherwise have without your debt. Debt is the most responsible way to elevate your social position.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
Nothing is more attractive than universal appeal. That is what makes androgyny the peacekeeping persuasion.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
Hypocrisy is a quality found in others. I am an optimist. I believe that saying the right thing will eventually cause people to do the right thing for me.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
I have never sought to displease; I merely seek pleasure and avoid the pain it causes those who work to produce it. That is what it means to live by the leisure principle.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
When one's unconscious is full of vice, nothing realizes inner potential like hypocrisy.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
Aping the lower class will only lead to fatherless children, unusable muscles, and the fear of tomorrow’s sobriety.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
What is the world coming to when girls allow their hands to be kissed without gloves? That young people don't use proper protection these days is exactly why there are always so many colds going around.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
There is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or a woman for their world. For the world of their center where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame. The love of the diver for his world of wavering light. His world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast. Born as a plunger into the deeps he is at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every colored sponge. As he holds himself to the ocean's faery floor, one hand clasped to a bedded whale's rib, he is complete and infinite. Pulse, power and universe sway in his body. He is in love. The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great colored surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry on his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes' handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in Love. The rich soil crumbles through the yeoman's fingers. As the pearl diver murmurs, 'I am home' as he moves dimly in strange water-lights, and as the painter mutters, 'I am me' on his lone raft of floorboards, so the slow landsman on his acre'd marl - says with dark Fuchsia on her twisting staircase, 'I am home.
Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1))
I happen to find ceilings much lovelier than the night sky myself. Sometimes I just stare at them for hours and wonder what could be up there.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
It’s best to only exercise when the air conditioning is working properly outside. A strong wind ensures one doesn’t sweat very much.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
Making love to a person in their sleep is the only guarantee they'll wake up with a smile on their face.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
Like so many women for whom money has always been provided without their understanding how, she was prepared to be a thorough and irresponsible plunger.
Booth Tarkington (The Magnificent Ambersons)
Don't believe anything I say. My point of view is merely objective.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
A hobby is labor disguising itself as leisure. It is extremely destructive to the boundaries of private life.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
She pressed the plunger down hard, in hope and without regret...Krystal Weedon had achieved her only ambition: she had joined her brother where nobody could part them.
J.K. Rowling (The Casual Vacancy)
I insert the bevel and draw back the plunger. I know that the syringe contains more than sodium chloride-that even as the toxic contents fill my fathers veins, he is sharing with me his final gift: the horror and thrill of saving lives.
Jacob M. Appel (Einstein's Beach House)
When you don't hold your pipe with the proper poise, smoking is very hazardous for your image.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
Why are you bringing up old shit? You're always doing it. Like a plunger.
Suzanne Wright (Taste of Torment (Deep In Your Veins, #3))
Dauntless traitors crowded the hallway; the Erudite crowd the execution room, but there, they have made a path for me already. Silently they study me as I walk to the metal table in the center of the room. Jeanine stands a few steps away. The scratches on her face show through hastily applied makeup. She doesn’t look at me. Four cameras dangle from the ceiling, one at each corner of the table. I sit down first, wipe my hands off on my pants, and then lie down. The table is cold. Frigid, seeping into my skin, into my bones. Appropriate, perhaps, because that is what will happen to my body when all the life leaves it; it will become cold and heavy, heavier than I have ever been. As for the rest of me, I am not sure. Some people believe that I will go nowhere, and maybe they’re right, but maybe they’re not. Such speculations are no longer useful to me anyway. Peter slips an electrode beneath the collar of my shirt and presses it to my chest, right over my heart. He then attaches a wire to the electrode and switches on the heart monitor. I hear my heartbeat, fast and strong. Soon, where that steady rhythm was, there will be nothing. And then rising from within me is a single thought: I don’t want to die. All those times Tobias scolded me for risking my life, I never took him seriously. I believed that I wanted to be with my parents and for all of this to be over. I was sure I wanted to emulate their self-sacrifice. But no. No, no. Burning and boiling inside me is the desire to live. I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to! Jeanine steps forward with a syringe full of purple serum. Her glasses reflect the fluorescent light above us, so I can barely see her eyes. Every part of my body chants it in unison. Live, live, live. I thought that in order to give my life in exchange for Will’s, in exchange for my parents’, that I needed to die, but I was wrong; I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live. Jeanine holds my head steady with one hand and inserts the needle into my neck with the other. I’m not done! I shout in my head, and not at Jeanine. I am not done here! She presses the plunger down. Peter leans forward and looks into my eyes. “The serum will go into effect in one minute,” he says. “Be brave, Tris.” The words startle me, because that is exactly what Tobias said when he put me under my first simulation. My heart begins to race. Why would Peter tell me to be brave? Why would he offer any kind words at all? All the muscles in my body relax at once. A heavy, liquid feeling fills my limbs. If this is death, it isn’t so bad. My eyes stay open, but my head drops to the side. I try to close my eyes, but I can’t—I can’t move. Then the heart monitor stops beeping.
Veronica Roth (Insurgent (Divergent, #2))
The smaller the dinner table, the better the side conversation: you can gossip about the guests without fearing whether you will be overheard. It just isn't good table manners to exclude someone from their own ridicule. That's why the juiciest side conversations occur at a table for one.
Bauvard (The Prince Of Plungers)
Toxic and abusive people love sending you emotional bills for debts you’ve already paid. I call them Plungers… because they love to bring up old shit.
Steve Maraboli
We're like coke heads or chronic masturbators, aren't we? Attempting to crank the last iota of abandonment out of an instrinsically empty and mechanical experience. We push the plunger home, we abrade the clitoris, we yank the penis and we feel nothing. Not exactly nothing, worse than nothing, we feel a flicker or a prickle, the sensual equivalent of a retinal after-image. That's our fun now, not fun itself, only a tired allusion to it. Nevertheless, we feel certain that if we can allude to fun one more time, make a firm statement about it, it will return like the birds after winter.
Will Self (My Idea of Fun)
the churn of stale words in the heart again love love love thud of the old plunger pestling the unalterable whey of words
Samuel Beckett
When I go house hunting, I use a rather large gun. You should see me fish for the best tasting Starbucks coffee. Oh, and can I borrow your plunger?
Jarod Kintz (I love Blue Ribbon Coffee)
And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass. Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long, far-travelling billows, and ever, at the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder, from the centre of soft plunging, as the plunger went deeper and deeper, touching lower, and she was deeper and deeper and deeper disclosed, the heavier the billows of her rolled away to some shore, uncovering her, and closer and closer plunged the palpable unknown, and further and further rolled the waves of herself away from herself leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft, shuddering convulsion, the quick of all her plasm was touched, she knew herself touched, the consummation was upon her, and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman.
D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley’s Lover)
The man with two plungers for hands never wipes his ass, but he also never clogs up a toilet either.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
Confusion of Confusions,” written by a plunger on the Amsterdam market named Joseph de la Vega;
John Brooks (Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street)
Was it last month or last year that the ambulance ran like a hearse with its siren blowing on suicide— Dinn, dinn, dinn!— a noon whistle that kept insisting on life all the way through the traffic lights? I have come back but disorder is not what it was. I have lost the trick of it! The innocence of it! That fellow-patient in his stovepipe hat with his fiery joke, his manic smile— even he seems blurred, small and pale. I have come back, recommitted, fastened to the wall like a bathroom plunger, held like a prisoner who was so poor he fell in love with jail.
Anne Sexton (Selected Poems)
Mostly what I remember is the way things looked sometimes after I'd push down the plunger, sometimes when I got so high so fast I couldn't even take the needle out of my arm. I just sat back, head lolling on my shoulders like a balloon on a string, and everything, walls, carpet, couch cushion, my own hands, broke down to swirling molecules, reassembled as a million other things, and danced before my eyes before arranging themselves once more as reality. The endless cycle, that dance of molecules and their return to something solid, left me as drained as if I'd flown around the sun with veins for wings.
Jerry Stahl (Permanent Midnight)
ON FRIDAY, 25 August, Roosevelt shocked most of his countrymen by dropping to the floor of Long Island Sound in one of the Navy’s six new submarines, appropriately named the Plunger. He remained beneath the surface (lashed with heavy rain) long enough to watch fish swim past his window. Then, taking the controls, he essayed a few movements himself, including one which brought the ship to the surface rear end up.
Edmund Morris (Theodore Rex)
Ingesting poison, fighting for food, being attacked by a larger rat or beaten with a toilet plunger: these are everyday rat dangers that make the life expectancy of the rat in the city approximately one year.
Robert Sullivan (Rats: Observations on the History and Habits of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants)
He should have been a buck in the days of the Regency - a boxer, an athlete, a plunger on the turf, a lover of all fair ladies, and by all account, so far down Queer Street that he may never find his way back again.
Arthur Conan Doyle (The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place)
Terror in itself is a helpless feeling that is usually injected immediately into our systems. Almost like it's just sitting dormant, filling a needle that is already poking into our veins. It's waiting for the perfect moment for the plunger to be pushed.
Aron Beauregard (The Slob)
Cascando" why not merely the despaired of occasion of wordshed is it not better abort than be barren the hours after you are gone are so leaden they will always start dragging too soon the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want bringing up the bones the old loves sockets filled once with eyes like yours all always is it better too soon than never the black want splashing their faces saying again nine days never floated the loved nor nine months nor nine lives saying again if you do not teach me I shall not learn saying again there is a last even of last times last times of begging last times of loving of knowing not knowing pretending a last even of last times of saying if you do not love me I shall not be loved if I do not love you I shall not love the churn of stale words in the heart again love love love thud of the old plunger pestling the unalterable whey of words terrified again of not loving of loving and not you of being loved and not by you of knowing not knowing pretending pretending I and all the others that will love you if they love you unless they love you
Samuel Beckett
Sometimes Mike would fuck her and I’d watch. They didn’t go to bed; they didn’t even take their clothes off. Mike would just stick it into her, stick it in at the crook of her elbow, and tease her till she moaned. Then he’d press the plunger and her whole body would shudder in a junk orgasm.
Barry Graham (The Book of Man)
It’s always the same before the shooting begins—the hostesses go into a frenzy of gaiety, and all the spongers and civilians crawl out of the wainscoting braying with good fellowship because thank God they ain’t going, and the young plungers and green striplings roister it up, and their fiancées let ’em pleasure them red in the face out of pity, because the poor brave boy is off to the cannon’s mouth, and the dance goes on and the eyes grow brighter and the laughter shriller—and the older men in their dress uniforms look tired, and sip their punch by the fireplace and don’t say much at all.
George MacDonald Fraser (Flashman at the Charge (Flashman Papers #4))
Blocked drains need to be repaired as soon as possible. However, failure to tackle the situation promptly will only make it worse.
Baileysupplies
Heroin is such a big scary word but it feels like Oxy at a fraction of the price. You just have to get past any squeamishness regarding needles. Fortunately, there were plenty of YouTube videos to help me along—tutorials (ostensibly for diabetics) showing how to find a vein and how to gently draw back the plunger at just the right moment, to make sure you’ve made contact with the bloodstream
Jason Rekulak (Hidden Pictures)
But do you think the achievements of the Americans -- envied the world over -- came without a cost? Just ask their African brothers. And do you think the engineers who designed their illustrious skyscrapers or built their highways hesitated for one moment to level the lovely little neighborhoods that stood in their way? I guarantee you, Alexander, they laid the dynamite and pushed the plungers themselves.
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
The nurse rolled up the patient’s sleeve. Flicked the inside of his forearm. There was something about the way the nurse spoke, something Anton couldn’t quite put his finger on. He shivered again as the syringe slid into the skin, and in the total silence he thought he could hear a rasp, the friction of the needle against flesh. The flow of the liquid being squeezed through the syringe as the plunger was pressed.
Jo Nesbø (Police (Harry Hole, #10))
There is a sign above the door in the shape of a door key, on it the words KEYS CUT. There’ll be a high smell of creosote, oil, paraffin, lawn treatment stuff. There’ll be brushheads with handles, brushheads without handles, handles by themselves, for sale. What else? Rakes, spades, forks, a garden roller, a wall of stepladders, a tin bath full of bags of compost. Calor gas bottles, saucepans, frying pans, mopheads, charcoal, folding stools made of wood, a plastic bucket of plungers, stacked packs of sandpaper, sacks of sand in a wheelbarrow, metal doormats, axes, hammers, a camping stove or two, hessian carpet mats, stuff for curtains, stuff for curtain rails, stuff for screwing curtain rails to walls and pelmets, pliers, screwdrivers, bulbs, lamps, pails, pegs, laundry baskets. Saws, of all sizes. EVERYTHING FOR THE HOME.
Ali Smith (Winter (Seasonal, #2))
Top of the Shitberg The first small turds that come out of you after getting stuffed on Indian or Mexican food. You're thinking, 'Is that it?' and a minute later the Mt. Everest of shit comes out of your ass - requiring two courtesy flushes followed by a plunger. Alternate meaning: A popular greeting among Jews living in Edwardian Dublin, when they met an the synagogue for morning services ~ 'Top of the shitberg to you, Seamus Goldberg.' 'And a top of the shitberg to you, Leopold Bloom.
Beryl Dov
The panic was blamed on many factors—tight money, Roosevelt’s Gridiron Club speech attacking the “malefactors of great wealth,” and excessive speculation in copper, mining, and railroad stocks. The immediate weakness arose from the recklessness of the trust companies. In the early 1900s, national and most state-chartered banks couldn’t take trust accounts (wills, estates, and so on) but directed customers to trusts. Traditionally, these had been synonymous with safe investment. By 1907, however, they had exploited enough legal loopholes to become highly speculative. To draw money for risky ventures, they paid exorbitant interest rates, and trust executives operated like stock market plungers. They loaned out so much against stocks and bonds that by October 1907 as much as half the bank loans in New York were backed by securities as collateral—an extremely shaky base for the system. The trusts also didn’t keep the high cash reserves of commercial banks and were vulnerable to sudden runs.
Ron Chernow (The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance)
Merrill Meewee knew his stones. As a boy in Kenya, skipping stones was his favorite free-time activity. There had been an abundance of saucer-shaped missiles on the banks of his father’s own fishpond. Fat, river-smoothed disks, they skipped ten, twelve, sixteen times before slipping beneath the surface with a watery plop. His father, a man of little wealth but great forbearance, was not pleased with his boy’s solitary pastime, but he never ordered him to stop. Instead, he asked the boy how many stones he thought the pond could hold. I don’t know, Meewee remembered answering. A hundred thousand? Oh, such a big number! And how many stones do you suppose you’ve thrown already? Merrill, who was an excellent student, calculated the number of stones he might have tossed in an hour and how many free hours were left each day after school and chores, how many afternoons in how many years since he first discovered the sport. I would estimate 14,850, he informed his father with a certain amount of swagger. His father was impressed. So many? And all of them have gone to the bottom? Of course they’ve gone to the bottom, he had said, embarrassed by his father’s apparent ignorance. They’re stones. They’re heavier than water. And heavier than fishes? Of course heavier than fishes. Good, good, his father concluded, patting him on the head. Keep at it, son, and soon I won’t have to work so hard. Father? It’s true. When you fill up my pond with your stones, I won’t need nets and plungers to harvest the fish. I’ll simply wade up to my ankles and pick them like squash. It was a lesson in diplomacy, as much as aquaculture, and it stayed with him all these years.
David Marusek (Mind Over Ship)
At the greatest cost! But do you think the achievements of the Americans—envied the world over—came without a cost? Just ask their African brothers. And do you think the engineers who designed their illustrious skyscrapers or built their highways hesitated for one moment to level the lovely little neighborhoods that stood in their way? I guarantee you, Alexander, they laid the dynamite and pushed the plungers themselves. As I’ve said to you before, we and the Americans will lead the rest of this century because we are the only nations who have learned to brush the past aside instead of
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
And I wrote a story for private circulation, "Miss Lewis & the Giant Turd," about a painful bowel movement that began in class, as she was drilling us on prepositions. Suddenly she emitted a low scraping sound like a box of rocks being dragged across concrete--like a glacier moving!--and she let out an AIIIIEEEEEEE and bent over double and hobbled to the girls' room, where she fell to the floor and cried pitifully for the janitor, who rushed in with a plunger and tried to extract the fecal mass from her, but it was too immense, and then the fire department arrived and laid her over the sink and attached a suction pump, two men on either side of her skinny butt, working a lever, and they managed to suction the poop out of her, and when they were done, she weighed forty-five pounds. And she couldn't teach anymore, she just sat on her front step waving to passing cars. This title passed from pupil to pupil, two grimy sheets of paper folded to pocket size.... The story found its way to Laura, Miss Lewis's pet, who handed it over to her, and she read it, thin-lipped, and tore it into tiny pieces and dropped them into the wastebacket. "This is so childish it doesn't bear talking about," she said. "It is beneath contempt.
Garrison Keillor (Lake Wobegon Summer, 1956)
My writer friends and I talk about the kinds of writers we are and some of us are plungers and some of us are plotters. I happen to be a plunger. I have an idea; usually I start out with the idea for the complication. For example, in Well Wished I knew that my protagonist was going to be stuck in the body of another girl who couldn't walk and that she was going to have to find her way back to her own body, but I didn't know any of the magical mechanisms. And in The Folk Keeper, I knew I was going to have a girl who was half selkie and that she was going to discover who she was, but I didn't know anything else. So I plunge in.
Franny Billingsley
Now, isn’t that neat.” Midwestern sarcasm, when it’s done correctly, can be a thing of rare beauty. It’s like performance art. Everywhere else in the world, you can identify sarcasm if you’re paying attention. Even if the hostility isn’t overt, you can read the signs. There’ll be slightly elongated syllables or a pitch that’s just a little off. It’s like a trombone player with a plunger head. There’s that slight “wah-wah” tone-bending to let you know not to take this too seriously. Midwestern sarcasm plays it straight and makes you listen more closely. You have to treat every conversation like a safecracker. Unless your ears have been trained to recognize it, you’ll miss the hint of a minor key. Sometimes you don’t realize what’s happened until hours later, when it’s 3:00 a.m. and you’re half-asleep, and it suddenly hits you. “Aw, crap, they didn’t mean any of that, did they?” Midwestern sarcasm becomes even more deadly when it’s combined with small-town isolationism. These women had been cheerleaders at our high school, they weren’t indie rock aficionados, and Wilco isn’t exactly a household name. So on the one hand, it wasn’t surprising that they hadn’t followed every turn in my career. It’s shocking that they even remembered I played music at all.
Jeff Tweedy (Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc.)
At the greatest cost! But do you think the achievements of the Americans—envied the world over—came without a cost? Just ask their African brothers. And do you think the engineers who designed their illustrious skyscrapers or built their highways hesitated for one moment to level the lovely little neighborhoods that stood in their way? I guarantee you, Alexander, they laid the dynamite and pushed the plungers themselves. As I’ve said to you before, we and the Americans will lead the rest of this century because we are the only nations who have learned to brush the past aside instead of bowing before it. But where they have done so in service of their beloved individualism, we are attempting to do so in service of the common good.
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
She could not tell Jenny that she stands and looks out the window of her kitchen in the morning and the tasks of the day unfurl themselves before her like a roll of celluloid and she thinks, Okay, tick spray and change of clothes and skating lesson and refill the toilet paper and need milk, onions, lemons and order more printer paper and get oil changed in car one and order food for the dog and wax bikini and make pasta with butternut squash and ricotta and wait do we have a fucking dog and get sixty-watt bulbs for the bar and restock Grey Goose and get clothes out of dryer and pluck single black hair from chin and clean car two before extended family comes and bring garbage bins inside and get new plunger and fuck my husband and walk the dog if we have one.
Lisa Taddeo (Three Women)
I didn’t answer, occupied in dissolving the penicillin tablets in the vial of sterile water. I selected a glass barrel, fitted a needle, and pressed the tip through the rubber covering the mouth of the bottle. Holding it up to the light, I pulled back slowly on the plunger, watching the thick white liquid fill the barrel, checking for bubbles. Then pulling the needle free, I depressed the plunger slightly until a drop of liquid pearled from the point and rolled slowly down the length of the spike. “Roll onto your good side,” I said, turning to Jamie, “and pull up your shirt.” He eyed the needle in my hand with keen suspicion, but reluctantly obeyed. I surveyed the terrain with approval. “Your bottom hasn’t changed a bit in twenty years,” I remarked, admiring the muscular curves. “Neither has yours,” he replied courteously, “but I’m no insisting you expose it. Are ye suffering a sudden attack of lustfulness?” “Not just at present,” I said evenly, swabbing a patch of skin with a cloth soaked in brandy. “That’s a verra nice make of brandy,” he said, peering back over his shoulder, “but I’m more accustomed to apply it at the other end.” “It’s also the best source of alcohol available. Hold still now, and relax.” I jabbed deftly and pressed the plunger slowly in. “Ouch!” Jamie rubbed his posterior resentfully. “It’ll stop stinging in a minute.” I poured an inch of brandy into the cup. “Now you can have a bit to drink—a very little bit.” He drained the cup without comment, watching me roll up the collection of syringes. Finally he said, “I thought ye stuck pins in ill-wish dolls when ye meant to witch someone; not in the people themselves.” “It’s not a pin, it’s a hypodermic syringe.” “I dinna care what ye call it; it felt like a bloody horseshoe nail. Would ye care to tell me why jabbing pins in my arse is going to help my arm?” I took a deep breath. “Well, do you remember my once telling you about germs?” He looked quite blank. “Little beasts too small to see,” I elaborated. “They can get into your body through bad food or water, or through open wounds, and if they do, they can make you ill.” He stared at his arm with interest. “I’ve germs in my arm, have I?” “You very definitely have.” I tapped a finger on the small flat box. “The medicine I just shot into your backside kills germs, though. You get another shot every four hours ’til this time tomorrow, and then we’ll see how you’re doing.” I paused. Jamie was staring at me, shaking his head. “Do you understand?” I asked. He nodded slowly. “Aye, I do. I should ha’ let them burn ye, twenty years ago.
Diana Gabaldon (Voyager (Outlander, #3))
Marcelina loved that miniscule, precise moment when the needle entered her face. It was silver; it was pure. It was the violence that healed, the violation that brought perfection. There was no pain, never any pain, only a sense of the most delicate of penetrations, like a mosquito exquisitely sipping blood, a precision piece of human technology slipping between the gross tissues and cells of her flesh. She could see the needle out of the corner of her eye; in the foreshortened reality of the ultra-close-up it was like the stem of a steel flower. The latex-gloved hand that held the syringe was as vast as the creating hand of God: Marcelina had watched it swim across her field of vision, seeking its spot, so close, so thrillingly, dangerously close to her naked eyeball. And then the gentle stab. Always she closed her eyes as the fingers applied pressure to the plunger. She wanted to feel the poison entering her flesh, imagine it whipping the bloated, slack, lazy cells into panic, the washes of immune response chemicals as they realized they were under toxic attack; the blessed inflammation, the swelling of the wrinkled, lined skin into smoothness, tightness, beauty, youth. Marcelina Hoffman was well on her way to becoming a Botox junkie. Such a simple treat; the beauty salon was on the same block as Canal Quatro. Marcelina had pioneered the lunch-hour face lift to such an extent that Lisandra had appropriated it as the premise for an entire series. Whore. But the joy began in the lobby with Luesa the receptionist in her high-collared white dress saying “Good afternoon, Senhora Hoffman,” and the smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and brightness of the frosted glass panels and the bare wood floor and the cream-on-white cotton wall hangings, the New Age music that she scorned anywhere else (Tropicalismo hippy-shit) but here told her, “you’re wonderful, you’re special, you’re robed in light, the universe loves you, all you have to do is reach out your hand and take anything you desire.” Eyes closed, lying flat on the reclining chair, she felt her work-weary crow’s-feet smoothed away, the young, energizing tautness of her skin. Two years before she had been to New York on the Real Sex in the City production and had been struck by how the ianqui women styled themselves out of personal empowerment and not, as a carioca would have done, because it was her duty before a scrutinizing, judgmental city. An alien creed: thousand-dollar shoes but no pedicure. But she had brought back one mantra among her shopping bags, an enlightenment she had stolen from a Jennifer Aniston cosmetics ad. She whispered it to herself now, in the warm, jasmine-and vetiver-scented sanctuary as the botulin toxins diffused through her skin. Because I’m worth it.
Ian McDonald (Brasyl)
College students were instructed to sit by themselves for up to fifteen minutes in a sparsely furnished, unadorned room and “entertain themselves with their thoughts.” They were allowed to think about whatever they liked, the only rules being that they should remain in their seat and stay awake. Before they entered the room they were obliged to surrender any means of distraction they had about their person, such as cell phones, books, or writing materials. Afterward, they were asked to rate the experience on various scales. Unsurprisingly, a majority reported that they found it difficult to concentrate and their minds had wandered, with around half saying they didn’t enjoy the experience. A subsequent experiment, however, revealed that many found being left alone in an empty room with nothing to occupy their minds so unpleasant (this is, after all, what makes solitary confinement such a harsh punishment in prisons) that they would rather give themselves electric shocks. In the first part of this experiment, the volunteers were asked to rate the unpleasantness of a shock delivered via electrodes attached to their ankle and say whether they would pay a small amount of money to avoid having to experience it again. In the second part, during which they were left alone with their thoughts for fifteen minutes, they were presented with the opportunity to zap themselves once again. Amazingly, among those who had said they would pay to avoid a repeat experience, 67 percent of the men (12 out of 18) and 25 percent of the women (6 out of 24) opted to shock themselves at least once. One of the women gave herself nine electric shocks. One of the men subjected himself to no fewer than 190 shocks, though he was considered exceptional—a statistical “outlier”—and his results were excluded from the final analysis. In their report for the journal Science, the researchers write, “What is striking is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid.” This goes a long way toward explaining why many people initially find it so hard to meditate, because to sit quietly with your eyes closed is to invite the mind to wander here, there, and everywhere. In a sense, that is the whole point: we are simply learning to notice when this has happened. So the frustrating realization that your thoughts have been straying—yet again—is a sign of progress rather than failure. Only by noticing the way thoughts ricochet about inside our heads like ball bearings in a pinball machine can we learn to observe them dispassionately and simply let them come to rest, resisting the urge to pull back the mental plunger and fire off more of them. One of the benefits of meditation is that one develops the ability to quiet the mind at will. “Without such training,” the psychologists conclude drily in their paper, “people prefer doing to thinking, even if what they are doing is so unpleasant they would normally pay to avoid it. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.
James Kingsland (Siddhartha's Brain: Unlocking the Ancient Science of Enlightenment)
Isaura, city of the thousand wells, is said to rise over a deep, subterranean lake. On all sides, wherever the inhabitants dig long vertical holes in the ground, they succeed in drawing up water, as far as the city extends, and no father. Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake; an invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything that moves in the sunlight is driven by the lapping wave enclosed beneath the rock's calcareous sky. Consequently, two forms of religion exist in Isaura. The city's gods, according to some people, live in the depths, in the black lake that feeds the underground streams. According to others, the gods live in the buckets that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the edge of the wells, in the revolving pulleys, in the windlasses of the norias, in the pump handles, in the blades of the windmills that draw the water up from the drillings, in the trestles that support the twisting probes, in the reservoirs perched on stilts over the roofs, in the slender arches of the aqueducts, in all the columns of water, the vertical pipes, the plungers, the drains, all the way up to the weathercocks that surmount the airy scaffoldings of Isaura, a city that moves entirely upward.
Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)
There was a noise like a plunger being withdrawn from a blocked sink and Ron surfaced.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6))
MashiMaro, the perverted rabbit who wore a plunger on his head.
Michelle Zauner (Crying in H Mart)
1 why not merely the despaired of occasion of wordshed is it not better abort than be barren the hours after you are gone are so leaden they will always start dragging too soon the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want bringing up the bones the old loves sockets filled once with eyes like yours all always is it better too soon than never the black want splashing their faces saying again nine days never floated the loved nor nine months nor nine lives 2 saying again if you do not teach me I shall not learn saying again there is a last even of last times last times of begging last times of loving of knowing not knowing pretending a last even of last times of saying if you do not love me I shall not be loved if I do not love you I shall not love the churn of stale words in the heart again love love love thud of the old plunger pestling the unalterable whey of words terrified again of not loving of loving and not you of being loved and not by you of knowing not knowing pretending pretending I and all the others that will love you if they love you 3 unless they love you
Samuel Beckett
Mushrooms use a catapult powered by the acceleration of a tiny droplet of fluid over the spore surface to launch spores from their gills; a relative of mushrooms called the artillery fungus employs a snap-buckling device that resembles a miniature toilet plunger to propel a spore-filled capsule into the air, and cup fungi and other ascomycetes use microscopic squirt guns to blast their spores skyward. Most
Nicholas P. Money (The Amoeba in the Room: Lives of the Microbes)
Shop for a wide range of Drain Rod Accessories, including clearing wheel, drop scraper, double worm screw, plunger and much more at baileysupplies.
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Thanks to time differentials and good telephone service, the world money market, unlike stock exchanges, race tracks, and gambling casinos, practically never closes. London opens an hour after the Continent (or did until February 1968, when Britain adopted Continental time), New York five (now six) hours after that, San Francisco three hours after that, and then Tokyo gets under way about the time San Francisco closes. Only a need for sleep or a lack of money need halt the operations of a really hopelessly addicted plunger anywhere.
John Brooks (Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street)
Eventually we were all called down, one or two at a time, to Gareth Evans’ office, where he told us how the deal with Kernot had been done over a plunger of coffee. Was it only me who was mortified the next morning to see that same plunger of coffee anecdote spread across every paper in the country? It was the beginning of the formulaic “inside story” (and of course it was later revealed that the story was more complicated than first appeared).
Laura Tingle (Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern (Quarterly Essay #60))
Where is he?” I say. I have been waiting for hours to ask that question. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was chasing Tobias through Dauntless headquarters. No matter how fast I ran he was always just far enough ahead of me that I watched him disappear around corners, catching sight of a sleeve or the heel of a shoe. Jeanine gives me a puzzled look. But she is not puzzled. She is playing with me. “Tobias,” I say anyway. My hands shake, but not from fear this time--from anger. “Where is he? What are you doing to him?” “I see no reason to provide that information,” says Jeanine. “And since you are all out of leverage, I see no way for you to give me a reason, unless you would like to change the terms of our agreement.” I want to scream at her that of course, of course I would rather know about Tobias than about my Divergence, but I don’t. I can’t make hasty decisions. She will do what she intends to do to Tobias whether I know about it or not. It is more important that I fully understand what is happening to me. I breathe in through my nose, and out through my nose. I shake my hands. I sit down in the chair. “Interesting,” she says. “Aren’t you supposed to be running a faction and planning a war?” I say. “What are you doing here, running tests on a sixteen-year-old girl?” “You choose different ways of referring to yourself depending on what is convenient,” she says, leaning back in her chair. “Sometimes you insist that you are not a little girl, and sometimes you insist that you are. What I am curious to know is: How do you really view yourself? As one or the other? As both? As neither?” I make my voice flat and factual, like hers. “I see no reason to provide that information.” I hear a faint snort. Peter is covering his mouth. Jeanine glares at him, and his laughter effortlessly transforms into a coughing fit. “Mockery is childish, Beatrice,” she says. “It does not become you.” “Mockery is childish, Beatrice,” I repeat in my best imitation of her voice. “It does not become you.” “The serum,” Jeanine says, eyeing Peter. He steps forward and fumbles with a black box on the desk, taking out a syringe with a needle already attached to it. Peter starts toward me, and I hold out my hand. “Allow me,” I say. He looks at Jeanine for permission, and she says, “All right, then.” He hands me the syringe and I shove the needle into the side of my neck, pressing down on the plunger. Jeanine jabs one of the buttons with her finger, and everything goes dark.
Veronica Roth (Insurgent (Divergent, #2))
She dropped her voice to a hoarse whisper that turned his blood to slush. "You will wake up and find me standing over your bed. You will see the flash of a blade before I plunger it into your heart. My face will be the last thing ever see.
B.J. Daniels (Into Dust (The Montana Hamiltons, #5))
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OK, so this is what’s going to happen, Felipe. You’re going to tell me exactly what I want to know or things are going to get… interesting.” He took a syringe out of his pocket and removed the safety cap. He showed it to the policeman then slid it into his arm and depressed the plunger. Felipe fought against the tape. “What the hell is that?” “Don’t worry, it’s nothing dangerous. Just a muscle relaxant and some Viagra.” Bishop leaned in close. “You can feel it can’t you? A warm fuzzy feeling, all your muscles relaxing, except one. But that’s not a muscle is it?” “What, what are you doing to me?” “I’m not going to do anything to you. But my friend is. I’m just going to video it and send it to all your police buddies. Or maybe I’ll just put it on the internet for all the perverts to jack off to.” He opened the door. It took every ounce of his discipline not to burst out laughing. “Tell me, Felipe, are you familiar with the expression, I’m going to make a playground out of your ass?” Mitch stood in the doorway wearing a gimp mask and a pair of cut-off denim shorts. His muscular, hairy chest was strapped into a harness with a steel ring in the middle. He was holding a giant black rubber dildo. “What the hell?” screamed the bound man. Bishop used his knife to cut the tape holding him to the chair. “It’s OK, Felipe. You seem to be already enjoying this.” The policeman looked down at his raging boner. “Nooo, you can’t do this. You can’t.” Already his voice was slurring as the drugs kicked in.
Jack Silkstone (PRIMAL Reckoning (PRIMAL #5))
Never Need A Plunger Again
Anonymous
How are men are like plungers? A: They spend most of their time in the hardware store or the bathroom.
Anonymous
Without a word of warning, Shane yanked his shirt over his head, then—thank the lord—dropped his pants, giving me a solid eyeful of his seriously impressive plunger
C.M. Stunich (Elements of Mischief (Hijinks Harem, #1))
Even the prick of the needle in her ass does nothing but make her stir, mumbling in her sleep. “Everything’s fine,” I whisper as I push down on the plunger. “You have nothing to worry about, little bird. Because you’re mine.” And nobody gets in the way of me taking what’s mine.
J.L. Beck (Empire of Lust (Torrio Empire #1))
Last color bleeds from the trees, the slow drip of rain, collapsing. The feverish maples decline. We pause to pick mushrooms, stick into our sacks these squat, warty, beige and tan hammers, these spongy plungers and rams, these alien, faceless denizens of damp. They are not in our book. As we walk through this flaccid rain, this vague sense of loss and wrong, we don’t talk. But we wonder about maples and mushrooms, about us: Anything you can’t name is dangerous.
Ronald Wallace
Imagine if to become a plumber, you had to lie flat on your face in the toilet section of a hardware store while all the senior plumbers swung plungers around you
Patricia Lockwood (Priestdaddy: A Memoir)
On a blazing, dusty street corner in the broken city, he took the chapbook out of his coat pocket, and slid off the strap. He found his pen – an antique plunger-action fountain, for his traditionalist tastes applied as much to the means of marking as what should be marked – and began to write.
Dan Abnett (Horus Rising (Horus Heresy #1))
Woody's life was leaking away but I was the one who stepped forward and pulled the plug. Was my timing right? Could he have had another day at home, another week? Could he have gone for one more turn around the park, had one last supper? We'll never know and to handle the reality of euthanasia I learned to be comfortable with the ambiguity and magnitude of when to take a life. All I know for sure is at that irredeemable moment when I drive the plunger home, I will be there for the person trading the overpowering presence of love and companionship with their pet for the cold, empty ache of loss.
Nick Trout (Tell Me Where It Hurts: A Day of Humor, Healing, and Hope in My Life as an Animal Surgeon)
There was a general shortage of medication. Even the iodine ran out. Either the supply system failed, or else we’d used up our allowance — another triumph of our planned economy. We used equipment captured from the enemy. In my bag I always had twenty Japanese disposable syringes. They were sealed in a light polyethylene packing which could be removed quickly, ready for use. Our Soviet ‘Rekord’ brand, wrapped in paper which always got torn, were frequently not sterile. Half of them didn’t work, anyhow — the plungers got stuck. They were crap. Our homeproduced plasma was supplied in half-litre glass bottles. A seriously wounded casualty needs two litres — i.e. four bottles. How are you meant to hold them up, arm-high, for nearly an hour in battlefield conditions? It’s practically impossible. And how many bottles can you carry? We captured Italian-made polyethylene packages containing one litre each, so strong you could jump on them with your army boots and they wouldn’t burst. Our ordinary Soviet-made sterile dressings were also bad. The packaging was as heavy as oak and weighed more than the dressing itself. Foreign equivalents, from Thailand or Australia, for example, were lighter, even whiter somehow … We had absolutely no elastic dressings, except what we captured — French and German products. And as for our splints! They were more like skis than medical equipment! How many can you carry with you? I carried English splints of different lengths for specific limbs, upper arm, calf, thigh, etc. They were inflatable, with zips. You inserted the arm or whatever, zipped up and the bone was protected from movement or jarring during transportation to hospital. In the last nine years our country has made no progress and produced nothing new…
Svetlana Alexievich (Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War)
What were you doing? This lot said you were over there," he growled, pointing to the section of the library he'd just searched. Rosa batted her lashes. "I went to see how Plunger was getting on. He's slowing down our work by trying to use his dick as a paintbrush." Plunger shrugged like that wasn't unusual behaviour. "It is the way of my crea-tiv-it-ai." “It’s creativit- tee ,
Caroline Peckham (Alpha Wolf (Darkmore Penitentiary, #2))
she told me that a friend of hers had heard of me and exclaimed “he’s disturbing to read.” now i like that – “disturbing to read: -- like popping pills or pushing the plunger down, like big knives and rusty razors. i’m fucking disturbing – let me disturb you too
Scott C. Holstad
You guys head in there. I have to, um, y’know, bathroom break.” I tend to say too much when bending the truth, which was why I added, “Hope there’s a plunger in there! Am I right?” My brain screamed in my skull. Why would you say that? Zoe and Faith both looked horrified.
Marcus Emerson (Spirit Week Shenanigans (Diary of a 6th Grade Ninja, #8))
A five gallon bucket with a hole drilled in the lid,” he said. “You put water, soap, and dirty clothes in it. You stick a plunger handle through the hole in the bucket lid, then put the lid on the bucket. You agitate it like you’re churning butter. It’s not perfect but it’s easier than a washboard.
Franklin Horton (Legion of Despair (The Borrowed World #3))
[...] and the tasks of the day unfurl themselves before her like a roll of celluloid and she thinks. Okay, tick spray and change of clothes and skating lesson and refill the toilet paper and need milk, onions, lemons and order more printer paper and get oil changed in car one and order food for the dog and wax bikini and make pasta with butter nut squash and ricotta and wait do we have a fucking dog and get sixty-watt bulbs for the bar and restock Grey Goose and get clothes out of the dryer and pluck single black hair from chin and clean car two before extended family comes and bring garbage bins inside and get new plunger and fuck my husband and walk the dog if we have one.
Lisa Taddeo (Three Women)
One did not need to know why the ovens were so ugly, so very ugly. A tragically burly insect eight feet tall and made out of rust. Who would want to cook with an oven such as this? Pulleys, plungers, grates and vents were the organs of the machine… The patients, all dead, were delivered on a stretcher-like apparatus. The air thick and warped with the magnetic heat of creation. Thence to the Chamber, where the bodies were stacked carefully and, in my view, counter-intuitively, with babies and children at the base of the pile, then the women and the elderly, and then the men. It was my stubborn belief that it would be better the other way round, because the little ones surely risked injury under that press of naked weight. But it worked. Sometimes, my face rippling peculiarly, with smiles and frowns, I would monitor proceedings through the viewing slit. There was usually a long wait while the gas was invisibly introduced by the ventilation grilles. The dead look so dead. Dead bodies have their own language.
Martin Amis (Time's Arrow)
I guess. You think he’ll get life, or a needle full of shit?” “I pray for the needle. I’d like to be there to push the plunger in the fucker, or maybe just forget the dope and jab him to death with the needle.” “The thing that worries me about you, Leonard, is you have such a hard time getting in touch with your true feelings.
Joe R. Lansdale (Mucho Mojo (Hap and Leonard, #2))
But do you think the achievements of the Americans—envied the world over—came without a cost? Just ask their African brothers. And do you think the engineers who designed their illustrious skyscrapers or built their highways hesitated for one moment to level the lovely little neighborhoods that stood in their way? I guarantee you, Alexander, they laid the dynamite and pushed the plungers themselves. As I’ve said to you before, we and the Americans will lead the rest of this century because we are the only nations who have learned to brush the past aside instead of bowing before it. But where they have done so in service of their beloved individualism, we are attempting to do so in service of the common good.
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
The comedy sketches had all the subtlety of a water-buffalo fight. One sketch involved one of the comics playing an unusual Pachinko machine. The machine was constructed on the lines of a girl wearing only panties and a brassiere. The comic pulled the plunger and let fly. The ball shot to the top of the machine and then fell down into one cup of the girl’s brassiere. This triggered bells and lights and sparks, a panel slid open, and one of the showgirls shoved her unadorned breast through the large hole in the brassiere. The comic pulled the plunger again and the same thing happened again—the ball fell into the other cup and a panel slid back and another showgirl shoved her breast through the other hole. I say another showgirl, because you could tell—they weren’t a set. The comic then pulled the plunger for the third time, the ball fell into her panties, and after the bells, the lights, and the sparks, the crotch panel slid back, and a midget stuck his head out and yelled, “What do we care if we lost the war—we got Coca-Cola!
Jack Douglas (The Adventures of Huckleberry Hashimoto)
GO WITH THE FLOW - BUT KEEP YOUR PLUNGER HANDY Stark Raving Dad
Sanderson Dean
In addition, your psychological makeup will influence the degree of risk you should assume. One investment adviser suggests that you consider what kind of Monopoly player you once were (or still are). Were you a plunger? Did you construct hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place? True, the other players seldom landed on your property, but
Burton G. Malkiel (A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing)