Skating Through Life Quotes

You said that life's just like skating; I just need to kick forward and take a chance, push off the ground and follow through. And when everything works out, I'll coast.

Through synergy of intellect, artistry and grace came into existence the blessing of a dancer.

Dance resides within us all. Some find it when joy conquers sorrow, others express it through celebration of movements; and then there are those... whose existence is dance,

It's only life. We all get through it. Not all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in acidents or altercations, while others skate through the years with nothing worse to worry about than an occassional bad-hair day. I still possessed both legs and both eyes, and even my hair looked all right when I rose that Wednesday morning in late January. If I returned to bed sixteen hours later, having lost all my hair but nothing else, I would consider the day a triumph. Even minus a few teeth, I'd call it a triumph.

Burdened no more is soul for whom life flows through dance and not breath.

Allure goes beyond appearances to the way they grace the world. Some women propel themselves by means of an internal gyroscope. Others glide through life as if on ice skates. Some women convey their tortured lives through their eyes; others encircle you in the music of their laughter.

I’m not the kind of girl who spends hours getting ready. I don’t blow dry my hair. And I hate make up. I’m not pretty. And I don’t want to be. I am passionate and restless and wild. I’m exhausted by prudent ideologies. I’m not inferior because of my lack of convention. I’m as strong as I am broken. I’m tired of having my sexuality mistaken for an invitation. I will sweat and I will run. I will let the rain come down on me. I want to feel life as I am. I don’t want to skate through having my immoderation controlled by weak judgements. By fear. I don’t want to be who I’m supposed to be, I want to be who I am.

Burdened no more is soul for whom life flows through dance like breath.

About how you can skate over the surface of the world for your entire life, visiting, leaving, without ever really falling through. But you can’t do that, it isn’t good enough. You have to be able to fall through. You have to be able to sink, to immerse yourself. You can’t just skate over the surface and visit and leave.

It's only life. We all get through it. Not all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in accidents or altercations, while others skate through years with nothing worse to worry about than an occasional bad-hair day.

If we walked through life on roller skates, surely there would be no stress situation that would rob us of our calm, we would simply be careful to do everything with caution, while still enjoying the pleasure it feels to simply go through life and disheveled with the wind.

You can skate over the surface of the world for your entire life, visiting, leaving, without ever really falling through. But you can’t do that, it isn’t good enough. You have to be able to fall through. You have to be able to sink, to immerse yourself. You can’t just skate over the surface and visit and leave.

I... I remember, she realized. A feeling came over her, so strong that for the smallest of moments, it warmed her soul. Pictures flew through her mind: She and Elsa talking in their bedroom, baking with their mother in the kitchen, running down the central staircase. Do the magic! she heard a voice say, and now she realized it was her younger self begging Elsa to create more snow. Together they had skated around the Great Hall and made snow angels. They had built Olaf! She used to marvel at Elsa's magic and always wanted her sister to use it. Do the magic! she heard herself beg again, and then she saw the moment when everything changed. In her haste to stop Anna from falling off a snow mound, Elsa had accidentally struck her. That was when she and Elsa had been ripped apart. She remembered everything!

There are vanishingly few of them, those days when the game can still surprise us. When it does happen, it comes without warning; we just have to trust that we’ll recognize it. So when the echo of the skates cutting into the ice bounds up the banks of seating, Sune stops and pauses for a moment before casting one final glance over his shoulder again. He sees the fifteen-year-old turn, holding his stick lightly in his hand, then set off again at blistering speed, and Sune will remember this as one of the true blessings in his life: seeing the impossible happen in Beartown for a third time. The caretaker looks up from the screws in the railing and sees the old coach sink onto one of the seats on the top row. At first he seems to be seriously ill. Then the caretaker realizes that it’s because he’s never seen the old man laugh before. Sune is breathing through his nose with tears in his eyes, and the whole rink smells of cherry blossom.

And as Adeline watches, she realizes she cannot stay. Or rather, she could—could find a way to skip from house to house, like stones skating across the river—but she will not. Because when she thinks of it, she feels neither like the river nor the stone, but like a hand, as it tires of throwing. There is Estele, closing her door. There is Isabelle, one moment kind, and the next filled with horror. Later, much later, Addie will make a game of these cycles, will see how long she can step from perch to perch before she falls. But right now, the pain is too fresh, too sharp, and she cannot fathom going through those motions, cannot weather the weary look on her father’s face, the rebuke in Estele’s eyes. Adeline LaRue cannot be a stranger here, to these people she has always known. It hurts too much, watching them forget her.

A dead world is never really dead. Even when the stars vanish in a great exodus, leaving an inky night that swallows the sky. Even when the sound of silence is a terrible thing to listen to in a city that once groaned with noise. But it’s not quite silence, is it? There are the birds that soar over bare roof rafters, egrets and jackdaws and scruffy brown scraps that go by a multitude of names calling joyfully to each other. There are the nocturnal animals who claw and scrape over cobblestones, lifting their gazes to the two pale moons impressed against a violet sky. There are the trees that stretch upwards, overgrown and languorous, from leaf-strewn courtyards, extending gracefully through balconies and walkways. And below them, the ferns that unfurl in dark, damp corners that might still bear cracked tiles in parched colours, or spongey wooden skates engraved with toothy chisel marks. Life, persistent and predictably stubborn, goes on. Close your eyes and the stars might not sing in this hushed city of dust and dreams, but there’s still singing nonetheless. Even if there’s just one voice left.

There’s an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief. The respite is short-lived. One moment I’m driving along a seemingly empty road, bouncing from side to side on the Smart’s town-car suspension as the hairdryersized engine howls its guts out beneath my buttocks, and the next instant the dashboard in front of me lights up like a flashbulb. I twitch spasmodically, jerking my head up so hard I nearly dent the thin plastic roof. Behind me the eyes of Hell are open, two blinding beacons like the landing lights on an off-course 747. Whoever they are, they’re standing on their brakes so hard they must be smoking. There’s a roar, and then a squat, red Audi sports coupe pulls out and squeezes past my flank close enough to touch, its blonde female driver gesticulating angrily at me. At least I think she’s blonde and female. It’s hard to tell because everything is gray, my heart is trying to exit through my rib cage, and I’m frantically wrestling with the steering wheel to keep the roller skate from toppling over. A fraction of a second later she’s gone, pulling back into the slow lane ahead of me to light off her afterburners. I swear I see red sparks shooting out of her two huge exhaust tubes as she vanishes into the distance, taking about ten years of my life with her.

Evolution is largely a temporal phenomenon, Merrill. The environment changes, and populations in that environment change in turn, or they languish. Individual organisms don't evolve; populations do. Nature doesn't give a damn about individuals. The only role we play in evolution is surviving long enough to give birth to offspring who are slightly different from us. Some of our offspring will prosper in a changing environment, and some of them will not. As for us individuals, once we've reproduced, nature has no more use for us. We perish along with our ill-adapted young. Death has always been an essential factor in species survival. Now consider the human race. We are a partial exception to the rule. Unlike other species, we have developed culture. Instead of adapting to a changing environment biologically, we can sometimes adapt to it culturally. If an Ice Age comes along, we don't need to grow fur on our bodies if we invent the fur coat. Culture allows us to adapt to almost any environment, including the harshest, like space. In fact, our cultural adaptation is so robust that it all but obviates the need to evolve biologically. We are so good at adapting to changing conditions with our knowledge and technology that we may deceive ourselves into believing that we are above nature. But only a fools believes that. Nature always has the last word. A star in our neighborhood could go supernova and wipe out all life in our solar system, and no amount of culture could save us from that. That, I believe, is the main reason you want to seed humanity throughout the galaxy. So as not to have all our eggs in one basket... The chief difference between biological and cultural adaptation is that while biological evolution doesn't care about individuals, cultural evolution does, often at the expense of the species. Look at how many times we've nearly wiped ourselves out through cultural means: the nuclear bomb, pollution, climate change, the Outrage. We can't seem to help ourselves. Look at what we've done: we've made individuals all but immortal, even when it means we can have no more children. In one stroke, we've eliminated the two key ingredients of evolution: offspring and death. From a biological perspective, we're skating on mighty thin ice. ... ...as long as the individual reigns supreme, there's a finite limit to our survival. ... We need a means for the individual, not just the species, to participate in biological evolution, and that's what my project is all about. We need to be able to let our biological bodies die, to have offspring that are molded by the changing needs of the environments we find ourselves in, and yet to serially inhabit these bodies as the same individual. That means we need to be able to move our minds from one body to the next. ... Mine is a singularity in which the obsolete individual is invited to cross over to the new, not simply to die out. The existing person need not die to make room for the newcomer. Anyone can play.

It's funny, you know. We're free. We make choices. We weigh things in our minds, consider everything carefully, use all the tools of logic and education. And in the end, what we mostly do is what we have no choice but to do. Makes you think, why bother? But you bother because you do, that's why. Because you're a DNA-brand computer running Childhood 1.0 software. They update the software but the changes are always just around the edges. You have the brain you have, the intelligence, the talents, the strengths and weaknesses you have, from the moment they take you out of the box and throw away the Styrofoam padding. But you have the fears you picked up along the way. The terrors of age four or six or eight are never suspended, just layered over. The dread I'd felt so recently, a dread that should be so much greater because the facts had been so much more horrible, still could not diminish the impact of memories that had been laid down long years before. It's that way all through life, I guess. I have a relative who says she still gets depressed every September because in the back of her mind it's time for school to start again. She's my great-aunt. The woman is sixty-seven and still bumming over the first day of school five-plus decades ago. It's sad in a way because the pleasures of life get old and dated fast. The teenage me doesn't get the jolt the six-year-old me got from a package of Pop Rocks. The me I've become doesn't rush at the memories of the day I skated down a parking ramp however many years ago. Pleasure fades, gets old, gets thrown out with last year's fad. Fear, guilt, all that stuff stays fresh. Maybe that's why people get so enraged when someone does something to a kid. Hurt a kid and he hurts forever. Maybe an adult can shake it off. Maybe. But with a kid, you hurt them and it turns them, shapes them, becomes part of the deep, underlying software of their lives. No delete. I don't know. I don't know much. I feel like I know less all the time. Rate I'm going, by the time I'm twenty-one I won't know a damned thing. But still I was me. Had no choice, I guess. I don't know, maybe that's bull and I was just feeling sorry for myself. But, bottom line, I dried my eyes, and I pushed my dirty, greasy hair back off my face, and I started off down the road again because whatever I was, whoever I was, however messed up I might be, I wasn't leaving April behind. Maybe it was all an act programmed into me from the get-go, or maybe it grew up out of some deep-buried fear, I mean maybe at some level I was really just as pathetic as Senna thought I was. Maybe I was a fake. Whatever. Didn't matter. I was going back to the damned dragon, and then I was getting April out, and everything and everyone else could go screw themselves. One good thing: For now at least, I was done being scared.

I knew you forever and you were always old, soft white lady of my heart. Surely you would scold me for sitting up late, reading your letters, as if these foreign postmarks were meant for me. You posted them first in London, wearing furs and a new dress in the winter of eighteen-ninety. I read how London is dull on Lord Mayor's Day, where you guided past groups of robbers, the sad holes of Whitechapel, clutching your pocketbook, on the way to Jack the Ripper dissecting his famous bones. This Wednesday in Berlin, you say, you will go to a bazaar at Bismarck's house. And I see you as a young girl in a good world still, writing three generations before mine. I try to reach into your page and breathe it back… but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack. This is the sack of time your death vacates. How distant your are on your nickel-plated skates in the skating park in Berlin, gliding past me with your Count, while a military band plays a Strauss waltz. I loved you last, a pleated old lady with a crooked hand. Once you read Lohengrin and every goose hung high while you practiced castle life in Hanover. Tonight your letters reduce history to a guess. The count had a wife. You were the old maid aunt who lived with us. Tonight I read how the winter howled around the towers of Schloss Schwobber, how the tedious language grew in your jaw, how you loved the sound of the music of the rats tapping on the stone floors. When you were mine you wore an earphone. This is Wednesday, May 9th, near Lucerne, Switzerland, sixty-nine years ago. I learn your first climb up Mount San Salvatore; this is the rocky path, the hole in your shoes, the yankee girl, the iron interior of her sweet body. You let the Count choose your next climb. You went together, armed with alpine stocks, with ham sandwiches and seltzer wasser. You were not alarmed by the thick woods of briars and bushes, nor the rugged cliff, nor the first vertigo up over Lake Lucerne. The Count sweated with his coat off as you waded through top snow. He held your hand and kissed you. You rattled down on the train to catch a steam boat for home; or other postmarks: Paris, verona, Rome. This is Italy. You learn its mother tongue. I read how you walked on the Palatine among the ruins of the palace of the Caesars; alone in the Roman autumn, alone since July. When you were mine they wrapped you out of here with your best hat over your face. I cried because I was seventeen. I am older now. I read how your student ticket admitted you into the private chapel of the Vatican and how you cheered with the others, as we used to do on the fourth of July. One Wednesday in November you watched a balloon, painted like a silver abll, float up over the Forum, up over the lost emperors, to shiver its little modern cage in an occasional breeze. You worked your New England conscience out beside artisans, chestnut vendors and the devout. Tonight I will learn to love you twice; learn your first days, your mid-Victorian face. Tonight I will speak up and interrupt your letters, warning you that wars are coming, that the Count will die, that you will accept your America back to live like a prim thing on the farm in Maine. I tell you, you will come here, to the suburbs of Boston, to see the blue-nose world go drunk each night, to see the handsome children jitterbug, to feel your left ear close one Friday at Symphony. And I tell you, you will tip your boot feet out of that hall, rocking from its sour sound, out onto the crowded street, letting your spectacles fall and your hair net tangle as you stop passers-by to mumble your guilty love while your ears die.

Why’re you still here?” She yawned. “Go away. Jared will be here any moment, and I’ll be nothing but an unfortunate memory.” I should go. Pivot and leave. To my relief, I started doing just that. The echo of my footsteps bounced on the bare walls. I did not look back. Knew that if I caught a glimpse of her again, I’d make a mistake. This was for the best. It was time to cut my losses, admit my one mistake in my thirty-one years of life, and move on. My life would return to normal. Peaceful. Tidy. Noiseless. Unexpensive. My hand curled around the doorknob, about to push it open. “Hey, asshole.” I stopped but didn’t turn around. I refused to answer to the word. “What do you say—one last time for the road?” I glanced behind my shoulder, knowing I shouldn’t, and found my soon-to-be ex-wife propped on the hood of my Maybach, her dress hiked up her waist, revealing she’d worn no panties. Her bare pussy glistened, ready for me. A dare. I never shied away from those. Throwing caution to the wind (and the remaining few brain cells she hadn’t fried with her mindless conversation), I marched to her. When I reached the car, she lifted her hand to stop me, slapping her palm against my chest. “Not so fast.” It is going to be fast and a half, seeing as I’m about to come just from watching you like this. I arched an eyebrow. “Cold feet?” “Nah, low temperature is your thing. Don’t wanna steal your thunder. Either we go all the way, or we go nowhere at all. It’s all or nothing.” It infuriated me that each time I gave her a choice, she fabricated another. If I gave her an option, she swapped it with one of her creation. And now, on the heels of my ultimatum, she’d dished out her own. And like a doomed fool, I chose everything. I chose my downfall. We exploded together in a filthy, frustrated kiss full of tongue and teeth. She latched on to my neck, half-choking me, half-hugging me. I fumbled with the zipper of my suit pants, freeing my cock, which by this point gleamed with precum, so heavy and so hard it was uncomfortable to stand. My teeth grazed down her chin, trailing her throat before I did what I hadn’t done in five fucking years and pushed into her, all at once. Bare. My cock disappeared inside her, hitting a hot spot, squeezed to death by her muscles. Oh, fuck. My forehead fell against hers. A thin coat of sweat glued us together. Never in my life had anything felt quite so good. I wanted to evaporate into mist, seep into her, and never come back. I wanted to live, breathe, and exist inside my beautiful, maddening, conniving, infuriating curse of a wife. She was the one thing I never wanted and the only thing I craved. Worst, still, was the fact that I knew I couldn’t deny her a single thing she desired, be it a frock or piece of jewelry. Or, unfortunately, my heart on a platter, speared straight through with a skewer for her to devour. Still beating and as vibrant red as candied apples. I retreated, then slammed into her harder. Pulled and rushed back in. My fingers gripped her by the waist, pinning her down, wild with lust and desire. I drove into her in jerky, frenzied movements of a man starved for sex, fucking the ever-living shit out of her. Now that I’d officially filed a restraining order against my logic, I grabbed the front of her throat, sinking my teeth onto her lower lip. My spearmint breath skated over her face. The hood of the car warmed her thighs, still hot from the engine, jacking up the temperature between us even further. Small, desperate yelps fled her mouth. The only sounds in the cavernous space came from my grunts, our skin slapping together, and her tiny gasps of pleasure. The car rocked back and forth to the rhythm of my thrusts... (chapter 44)

A long time ago inside a local ice rink, 15 year olds went to battle to win a game of hockey.  They played for themselves, for their teams, for their coaches, for their towns, and for their families. It was a 0-0 tie in the 2nd period.     Both goalies were outstanding.  But one appeared to be somewhere else. Thinking.  The shot came.    The antagonist wasn’t aiming to break the scoreless tie.  He was living up to his agreement with the other team’s coach.  A coach who wanted his son to be the team's goalie.     He didn’t want a new goalie that could take his team where they have never been.  The playoffs.  A goalie that could secure his team at the top.  The coach watched the shot he bought.      The goalie could have shifted, dodged out of the way, but he was paralyzed.  He dropped to the ice when the puck struck his unprotected neck.     The player skated over to examine the goalie. He had accomplished his task.    And with the money he earned, he can buy the bicycle he always wanted.     The goalie’s father was standing amongst the other parents.  He was enraged that his son didn’t make the save.     He felt the hard work he put into his boy slowly fade, and quickly die out.  He knew how good his son was, and would be.  He knew the puck struck because the goalie let it.  He did not know why.   I groaned as the puck hit me in the arm.  I had pads, but pads can only soften the blow. I squeezed my arm.     My father stood and watched.     My friend fired another shot that whacked me in the throat, knocking me down.  I felt dizzy.      It was frigid on the pond in winter.     This is where I learned to play hockey.  This is also where I learned it was painful to be a goaltender.  I got up slowly, glowering at him.  My friend was perplexed at my tenacity.     “This time, stay down!” And then he took the hardest slap shot I have ever encountered.     The puck tore through the icy air at incredible speed right into my face.     My glove rapidly came up and snatched it right before it would shatter my jaw.  I took my glove off and reached for the puck inside.     I swung my arm and pitched it as fiercely as I could at my friend.     Next time we play, I should wear my mask and he should wear a little more cover than a hat.  I turned towards my father.  He was smiling.  That was rare.     I was relieved to know that I was getting better and he knew it.  The ice cracked open and I dropped through…      The goalie was alone at the hospital.  He got up and opened the curtains the nurse keeps closing at night so he could see through the clear wall.     He eyed out the window and there was nothing interesting except a lonely little tree.  He noticed the way the moonlight shined off the grass and radiated everything else.  But not the tree.  The tree was as colourless as the sky.     But the sky had lots of bright little glowing stars.  What did the tree have?  He went back to his bed and dozed off before he could answer his own question.   Nobody came to visit him at the hospital but his mother.     His father was at home and upset that his son is no longer on the team.  The goalie spot was seized by the team’s original goalie, the coach’s son.     The goalie’s entire life had been hockey.  He played every day as his father observed.  He really wanted a regular father, whatever that was.  A father that cares about him and not about hockey.  The goalie did like hockey, but it was a game.         A sport just like other sports, only there’s an ice surface to play on.  But he did not love hockey.     It was just something he became very good at, with plenty of practice and bruises.     He was silent in his new team’s locker room, so he didn’t assume anyone would come and see how he was doing.

the foster-to-adopt experience is not one of those times where trying to skate by with a bare minimum of knowledge is going to cut it. There are just too many decisions, too many forks in the road, too many implications to not be on top of your game. And really, this is probably one thing in life where you DO want to be on top of your game. It’s a crazy enough situation when you know what you’re doing! Not having an understanding of the system, the politics, or the twists and turns would be maddening at least and at most, could result in you making a bad decision or a mistake that has long term consequences on your life and the life of your child. So I hate to break it to you if you thought you’d picked up your last textbook back in school, but there are several steps along the way where you’ll need to do some research in order to ensure that things go as smoothly as possible.

You sure changed your tune mighty fast." Kane's hands were busily tugging his dress shirt from his slacks. His knuckles accidently brushed against Avery's throbbing hard-on causing him to screw his eyes shut as an all-consuming need coursed through his veins. He couldn't help but let out a groan as those same knuckles skated up and down his length again; this time, no doubt, with deliberate intent. Kane knew exactly how to push his buttons and bring his body to life. In a matter of seconds, his husband managed to get him out of his shirt, undo his pants, had his slacks pushed partway down his thighs, and had a hand down the front of his silk boxers.

The only course to pursue to make life bearable on such a day, at least for women (I speak not of men, considering their case hopeless, unless they skate), is, immediately after breakfast to draw a chair as close to the fire as a chair will go, without tumbling in, and to seat yourself upon it, with a book. By all means let the book be a shabby one as to outside, else your pleasure will be marred by alarms as to the warping of its fine back by the action of the fire. A shabby book then, either an old friend, whose worth you know well, having gauged it and measured its value on many a happy day before,—an old friend with turned down leaves, and dashes and pencil-marks, and, if you are sentimental, a sprig of some flower, so long dead as to be unrecognisable, between two pet pages,—or else, a stranger with a pleasant new face, whose acquaintance you are glad to make, and let agreeable, fresh ideas filter through your passively recipient mind from its open pages.

IT’S ONLY LIFE. WE ALL GET THROUGH IT. Not all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in accidents or altercations, while others skate through the years with nothing worse to worry about than an occasional bad-hair day.

All of them skated through life making choices that could be swept away and tidied up with incomprehensible ease simply because of who they were.

Bombs spewing like volcanoes, glass race tracks, hookin' u-bowl skate ramps, barrels beautiful and violent at the same time that fill us with waves of life straight from the source and the force of God in our veins when all of our fear and pain and joy pulse through us in waves as we reach for the light at the end of the tunnel. A fleeting moment we know we are alive. Every wave is a life on its own unique path... its own journey. The ride, man. And if we're lucky we're there for that final moment...looking into its soul.

Sometimes you have to skate through life, sliding on the surface because it's too hard to feel. So you keep going. Keep busy. Fill the days, hours, and minutes, hoping to come out on the other side. Stopping to try to understand why causes too much pain.

As you comply to the Holy Spirit’s leading, you will gain a greater understanding of what I have already worked out for you. I will not deceive you. Take My hand and allow Me to walk you through the valley of death. You will fear no evil for knowing with assurance that your hand is in My hand. I have gone before you and saw the enemy’s plan—and the way of escape. The enemy will not see you coming; you will catch him off course even when he tries to catch you slipping. Know, My child, that I have your footing and you will not slip or fall on the ice rink of life. I will skate with you, and together we will become a great partnership to success. I have given you authority and graced you with power to resist the enemy of your purpose and he will run from you. The devil only recognizes authentic authority. Give voice to that which I have placed within you. Tell sickness to flee today, disease to flee today, poverty to flee today, demon spirits to flee today.

Each evening, after my parents’ self-medication, their behavior would change. Some of the time they would be happier and we could get through the evening unscathed. But sometimes it would get ugly.

Her house was built on a foundation of sand. The ice she was skating on was simply too thin. She fell through, into the water below, and is drowning.

If you would have asked the coach if he’d like to have a team of players like me, skilled guys who could skate, pass and shoot, play hard, but clean or a team full of players like Billy, who weren’t the most skilled, but who would intimidate and attempt to put an opponent through the boards, he tell you in a nanosecond he’d want a team full of “Billys.

Still and again, on the page, I smithereen the five-minute rule; I take my own damned time to stretch and look around. Because music is possible, I want music. Because I skated, I want ice and air for prose. Because plot bores me and knowing doesn’t, I write to find out what I know, or if I know, or if I might know sometime soon. “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end,” Virginia Woolf wrote, in “Modern Fiction.” She thought it, she said it, and at the hand press she and her husband called Hogarth, the press through which she published anything she pleased as she pleased (after her first two books), she sat with the weight of the words in her hands, the Caslon As and Bs and Cs, and letter by letter she chased haloes.