Wringer Quotes

We were together because we were addicted to each other. I was never as intoxicated as I was when we were happy together, and I knew it was the same for him. We were putting ourselves through the wringer for those moments of perfection between us, but they were so tenuous that only our stubbornness, determination and love kept us fighting for them.

Not now, old woman," I tossed over my shoulder coldly. "I need sleep." Funny. You didn‘t seem to need so much a few days ago." I felt the blood drain from my face. I wasn‘t ready for this confrontation. I might never be ready for it. In fact, sleep was the last thing on your mind," he said tightly. He was angry. I could hear it in his voice. What was he angry about? I was the one who‘d been through the emotional wringer. My hands curled into fists, my breathing grew shallow. I trusted him no more today than I had two months ago. "Fucking was all you wanted.

The very fabric of time and space is about to be put through the wringer.

BERNSTEIN: “I’ll read you the first few paragraphs.” (He got as far as the third. Mitchell responded, “JEEEEEEEEESUS” every few words.) MITCHELL: “All that crap, you’re putting it in the paper? It’s all been denied. Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published. Good Christ! That’s the most sickening thing I ever heard.” BERNSTEIN: “Sir, I’d like to ask you a few questions about—” MITCHELL: “What time is it?” BERNSTEIN: “Eleven thirty. I’m sorry to call so late.” MITCHELL: “Eleven thirty. Eleven thirty when?” BERNSTEIN: “Eleven thirty at night.” MITCHELL: “Oh.” BERNSTEIN: “The committee has issued a statement about the story, but I’d like to ask you a few questions about the specifics of what the story contains.” MITCHELL: “Did the committee tell you to go ahead and publish that story? You fellows got a great ballgame going. As soon as you’re through paying Ed Williams* and the rest of those fellows, we’re going to do a story on all of you.

A character with certain weaknesses, when being put through the wringer of a particular struggle, is forged and tempered into a changed being.

We were putting ourselves through the wringer for those moments of perfection between us, but they were so tenuous that only our stubbornness, determination, and love kept us fighting for them.

Something like hearing that your grandmother got her whole body pulled through the wringer on a washing machine, or something like hearing about a horse slipping on the ice and landing on some kid you went to school with.

We're all hurt and broken ... You're no different. You walk around with that sorry face, as if you're the only one's seen hardship. Have you tried looking at anyone else's face? Everyone in here's been put through the wringer.

They stood staring at each other’s face, the only place their eyes were safe.

By this time in their lives, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory were like lil maids, waking up and making their beds first thing, sweeping and dusting, the house would be shining. We were brought up with cleanliness. All of Lolo’s children knew how to clean, including the boy. “Guess who be out there windin’ them clothes through that wringer? Your big uncle,” Uncle Joe told me. When two of Lolo’s friends whom the children called Aunt Ruth and Aunt Agnes arrived at Roman Street for the annual Mardi Gras and Nursing Club balls, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory pressed their gowns and laid them out on the bed for the women to slip into after they had taken their baths. When they returned from their parties, they found lamplit rooms, their slippers by turned-down beds, their nightclothes already laid out for them.

Pop culture and love songs, in particular, can contribute to our belief that love is all about chemistry and insanity. It is when you are enduring careless, neglectful, unkind, and disconnected words and behavior from a partner, and falling back on “chemistry” as the rationale, that you need to take a long hard look at the idea of chemistry as a factor that may be imprisoning you in a one-sided, narcissistic relationship. Sometimes the good guys and gals get their opportunity once a person has already been through the wringer with a narcissist. After a person experiences the scorpion’s sting, the comfort of a kind person can become a soft and loving place to land.

Killing the pigeons and putting them out of their misery stubbornly refused to mean the same thing. Palmer thought about misery, and it seemed to him that a shotgun was not the only way to end it. When Palmer was miserable, for example, his mother or father would hold him close and wipe his tears. When Palmer's mother or father put him out of his misery, they did not shoot him, they offered him a cookie. Why then on Pigeon Day did the people bring guns instead of cookies?

Shirt" The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, The nearly invisible stitches along the collar Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break Or talking money or politics while one fitted This armpiece with its overseam to the band Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. One hundred and forty-six died in the flames On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes— The witness in a building across the street Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step Up to the windowsill, then held her out Away from the masonry wall and let her drop. And then another. As if he were helping them up To enter a streetcar, and not eternity. A third before he dropped her put her arms Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down, Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers— Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.” Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks, Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian, To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor, Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers To wear among the dusty clattering looms. Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader, The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields: George Herbert, your descendant is a Black Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit And feel and its clean smell have satisfied Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality Down to the buttons of simulated bone, The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape, The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

Little kids on pastel bikes pedaled furiously, churning the heat to butter...

The price of peace had been high: expelling himself from the gang, proclaiming himself a traitor, banishing his beloved pet. For such a price, a peace should be excellent. Yet when Palmer reached for it, tried to taste it, it was not there.

Other cars zoomed, and soon the pigeon was meat and feathers, flat. Then an old woman with a watering can began to sprinkle the road, and the meat plumped up and came together again with the feathers...

During the week his father said many things, mostly with his hands. He rubbed Palmer’s hair and squeezed his shoulder and tugged on his shirt and tickled his ribs and pulled him backward with a finger hooked in the back pocket of his jeans and lightly brushed the side of his neck with his fingertips as he stopped and chatted with friends. Each of these things had a different meaning to Palmer and yet the same—a language unlearned, of words unheard, that came to roost at some warm and waiting perch far below his ears.

And whenever she saw Palmer with them at school, she acted as if she did not know him. Palmer sensed that she was doing this for his sake.

They were laughing and playing ball when Palmer, letting fly a long shot from beyond the bed, said, “Do you like my father?” Dorothy watched the ball bounce off the door. “What kind of question is that?” “Do you?” “Sure, why?” “Do you think he’s nice?” “Yeah, don’t you?” Palmer thought for a moment. “Yeah, he is. I guess that’s the problem.

Same old across-the-street Dorothy he had known all his life. And yet, somehow, not the same old Dorothy. Though she looked the same as always, Palmer had been seeing something else in her lately. Whatever it was, it registered not in his eyes but in his feelings, and was most clearly known to him by its absence in the company of anyone but her. It made him feel floating.

Tears filled his eyes. He let go. “I don’t want to be a wringer. But everybody else is a wringer when they’re ten, and I’m going to be ten in seventy-one days, and then I’m going to have to be a wringer too but I don’t want to. So what kind of a kid am I? Everybody wants to kill pigeons but me. What’s the matter with me?” He said it all. He said things he had been thinking and feeling for years. He said things he didn’t even know he had been thinking until he heard them come out of his mouth. He told her how he hated the golden bird, the trophy his father had won one year for shooting the most pigeons. He told her it confused him. How could one person be both a shooter of pigeons and a loving father?

...he told her again and again that he did not, he really did not want to be a wringer. Dorothy hopped down from the desk. She walked across the room and stood before Palmer and looked straight into his eyes. “Then don’t,” she said. She made it sound so simple.

And Palmer, he couldn’t decide, or rather, he didn’t want to decide. He simply wanted to enjoy: the bright spring day, the company of his friends. There was nothing he wanted to do—he simply wanted to be. But this was not something he could explain to himself, much less to the guys.

...suddenly the sunlight was briefly snipped, as if a page had been turned in front of a lightbulb.

He dreaded the closing bell. When it came he marched up to the teacher and told her he thought she should keep him after school. She looked at him funny. “And why is that, Palmer?” “Because I was bad.” She looked surprised. Palmer was never bad. “I was not aware of that.” “You just didn’t catch me.” “Is that so? And now you wish to confess?” “Yes.” “You want to clear your conscience.” “Yes.” “I see.” She was smiling. She settled back in her chair. “So, what bad thing did you do?” “I spit on the floor.” Her eyebrows went up. “Really? Right here? In this room?” “Yes.” “When did you do this?” “Uh, after lunch.” She stood. “Would you mind showing me where you did it?” Palmer had not anticipated this. He had not thought a confession required proof.

Palmer stood there, hanging from her eyes.

Newborn leaf clusters on the surrounding trees had a look of pale green popcorn. Tufts of onion grass sprouted across the soccer field, releasing their sweet scent.

Palmer did not know what to say. He looked at Dorothy. She was staring at him. Somehow her face gave him the answer. He shook his head no.

Then he began smelling the gray and sour odor even when his father wasn’t there, even when Pigeon Day was over. It might happen in the morning as he sat in school, or at night as he lay in bed. It could even happen in his father’s lap in the middle of winter, when the shotgun had been locked away for months. The smell was sure to come on his birthday. It did not spoil his birthday, as it did not spoil his father’s lap, but it changed those things so they did not feel quite as good as before.

In their beaks they pinched the edges of the town, plucked it up and flew away with it

Next thing he knew he was yanked out of bed and onto his feet. “Come on,” whispered Beans, “we got somewhere to go.” It did not occur to Palmer not to go along. Once the shock wore off, he realized what an honor had been granted him. Imagine: A month ago these guys ignored him except to tease him; now they snuck into his house and climbed into bed with him. Palmer LaRue. Amazing!

Their mooncast shadows snagged on potholes in the old parking lot and pulled like black taffy.

The setting sun seemed to have ladled its syrupy light over the crusted snow, so that ordinary house parts and backyards in this fading moment seemed a spectacular raspberry dessert.

The empty look on Beans’s face indicated that the answer had reached his ears, but no farther.

Henry. Whose streak, unlike Beans’s, was meek, not mean. Who ran with Beans and Mutto. Who did what they did. But was different.

In the utter darkness he felt himself to be nothing but ears and fingertips. He could feel Nipper’s heartbeat, putt-putting away behind the toothpick ribs like a tiny motor scooter. He could feel the cold, golden gaze of the trophy pigeon two rooms away. The silence of the house at night was not total. Somewhere a clock was ticking. Cricks and creaks came from nearby and distant quarters, as if the house were twitching in a sleep of its own.

He pictured them in his room, shadows, dark upon dark, Beans’s penlight like a starflake moving in the darkness...

And where were you last night?” said Beans. It occurred to Palmer that he had a right to questions of his own. “Where was I? Where were you?

Henry was staring at the sky. Palmer saw Henry for what he was: a captive, strong enough to warn him about last night, but too weak to do anything except follow Beans. He saw in Henry something of himself, and worse, what he could become.

She went on playing, tossing a green beanbag into the chalk-numbered squares, ignoring him. At last he thought of a funny thing to say. “Who’s winning?” She said nothing. She tossed the beanbag to the farthest square and hopped on down and back. She tossed the bag out again, and just when it seemed she would never speak, she said, “Thanks for inviting me to your party.” It made no sense, but Palmer was thrilled to hear her voice. “It was all boys,” he said. “Good,” she said with a disdainful sniff. Sometimes it amazed him that this girl, just out of third grade, could make him feel so little. She went on hopping.

They shoot them.” For a long time Dorothy Gruzik did not move. It looked as if she were waiting for rain to fall into her mouth. When she finally turned her eyes back to Palmer, he wished he wasn’t there. “What?” she said. “They shoot them,” he repeated, and the words were dusty and bitter on his tongue. There seemed only one way to get rid of the bad taste, and that was to flush out his mouth with more and more words.

And to those nearby, and finally to Beans himself, it became clear that even now, even this close, still—still—she would not look at him. And then she did it. She spoke. But the person she spoke to was not Beans. It was Palmer LaRue. She took one step back from Beans and walked straight over to Palmer and stood squarely in front of him and said, “Why are you doing this to me?” And just like that, the girl in the red coat and floppy hat was no longer a target. She was Dorothy, there were tears in her eyes, and she was saying to him, not to anyone else, but to him, to Palmer, “Why are you doing this to me?” And he knew that through these last weeks she had been hurting after all, and that it had been himself, not Beans, who had hurt her the most.

In a way more felt than thought, he sensed a connection between Nipper’s absence and Dorothy’s words, which had been haunting him without letup.

He loved to see them playing with his birthday present. Each thud of a foot said: We’re kicking your soccer ball. We like you. You’re one of us.

But then isn't that always like a woman, to want to drag every word and sentiment over and over through the wringer, until the meaning is gone. To over-process. To be absolutely sure.

Let’s bomb Fishface’s house!

Ehh, yer old man!

What if my twin girls’ seemingly meaningless melodramas were not a punishment but rather a mercy from the Lord? A daily opportunity to die to myself? To root out impatience and self-indulgence. To grow my capacity for both empathy and tenacity. To make me a more creative mama. And ultimately, to drive me to my knees at the foot of the hard, painful, bloody cross my Savior endured, not randomly or without purpose but for my ultimate benefit. What if good could come from being dragged through the emotional wringer on the daily? What if, instead of despising the hard and kicking at it in contempt and disgust, I embraced it with open, if faltering, arms and leaned into its potential to transform my view of God and of His goodness in allowing me to walk a difficult path? What if I truly let myself believe that hard is not the same thing as bad?

What if my twin girls’ seemingly meaningless melodramas were not a punishment but rather a mercy from the Lord? A daily opportunity to die to myself To root out impatience and self-indulgence. To grow my capacity for both empathy and tenacity. To make me a more creative mama. And ultimately, to drive me to my knees at the foot of the hard, painful, bloody cross my Savior endured, not randomly or without purpose but for my ultimate benefit. What if good could come from being dragged through the emotional wringer on the daily? What if, instead of despising the hard and kicking at it in contempt and disgust, I embraced it with open, if faltering, arms and leaned into its potential to transform my view of God and of His goodness in allowing me to walk a difficult path? What if I truly let myself believe that hard is not the same thing as bad?

When I look in the mirror, I don't see a body slimmed through strict dieting and weight loss. I see a body that's weary, that's battered, that has been through absolute hell. I see a body that's resilient and has gone through the wringer to keep me alive. None of what I've endured matters in this unwinnable scheme: I am thinner, and therefore everything I've experienced to get here is secondary.

She was even at fault for having brought a wringer-mop from England, complaining loudly that such a simple thing was unprocurable in "this God-forsaken country".

If all of my sensible clothes hadn’t gone missing, or if Mrs. O’Connor hadn’t conveniently shredded my last skirt and blouse in that wringer—something I’m still not convinced was an accident—it wouldn’t be so difficult getting dressed,” Millie grumbled as she suddenly stuck a hand on his leg when the buggy ran over a rut in the road. Immediately snatching her hand back, she blew out a breath. “I do beg your pardon, Everett.” “Think nothing of it,” he managed to respond in a voice that sounded a little high-pitched. “There,

You make me laugh, honey. Even Susan, who was dead set to think you were taking me for a ride, or at the very least would put me through the emotional wringer, got over it when she saw I’d found someone who made me happy. It had not occurred to me in my life of plenty that I was missing anything, but I’ve learned I was. I started this in an attempt to make you happy. What I’m discovering is that it’s happening the other way around.

French soldiers literally drank the entire day, beginning with wine (un pauvre larme – “a little teardrop”), progressing to spirits (le café le pousse-café), climaxing with a gut-searing brandy (le tord-boyaux – “the gut-wringer”), and ending with la consolation, a sweet liqueur that the French soldier sipped as he lay in his bunk contemplating the next day’s exertions. Far from imbuing the army with an ésprit

I stared at Jim in horror, my skin crawling. “A Guardian banished me. Me! But I’m a Guardian. Can we banish each other? Oh, crap!” Jim nodded. “You’re not just a Guardian, you’re a Guardian Plus! Now with extra ‘prince of Abaddon’ cleaning power.” I’d like to point out—the dark power’s voice started to say. “I have enough on my plate right now!” I snapped at it. The voice sulked into silence. “Yeah, well, you may just have to deal with it,” Jim said, moseying over to where I’d been standing. “What were you looking for?” “I can’t believe another Guardian banished me just because I happen to be a prince of Abaddon. There should be some rule about not banishing demon lords who are also Guardians.” Jim cocked an eyebrow. “Like you think this is a normal situation?” “Normal? I don’t even know what’s normal anymore,” I fumed, marching around the room while wringing my hands. “And now look, I’m wringing my hands. Have you ever known me to be a hand-wringer? I detest the sort of woman who wrings her hands! It signifies weakness, and lack of coherence, and a totally unprofessional attitude!” “And if we know anything about you, it’s that you’re a professional, and you’re confident,” Jim said, nosing a spot on the floor. “Damn straight I am!” I yelled, forcing my hands apart so they couldn’t wring themselves. “Look, they’re trying to do it again. It’s like my hands are possessed or something! Dear god, it’s the dark power. The dark power has taken over my hands and is trying to wring me into insanity!” “Is this little drama going to take long? ’Cause if it is, I want popcorn and a Diet Coke with extra ice.” “You’re not going to like where I put the popcorn and extra ice,” I said, ignoring my possessed hands to glare at the demon with much intent. Jim’s eyes widened as it backed away. “You’ve got that evil, slightly insane look down pat. Have you been practicing? We’re talking seriously scary, Ash. Hannibal-Lecter-has-nothing-on-you sort of scary.” “Enough banter from you, buster,” I said, trying to pull myself together. “Let’s go over this situation again calmly. One: the dark power has taken over my hands.” I have not! “Not listening! Two: there is a Guardian out there who can banish me at will. Which means that every other Guardian can probably do the same. Lovely. Just what I need—more people trying to do me in.” I slumped down into a chair and thought seriously about crying, but dropped that thought when my hands crept to ward each other.

You know, the kind of person who gets this tattoo is probably the kind that should keep it very quiet,” she says, looking at me from the corner of her eye. “Or else someone will start thinking they’re Divergent.” “Divergent?” “That’s a word we have for people who are aware during simulations, who refuse categorization,” she says. “A word you don’t speak without care, because those people often die in mysterious circumstances.” She has her elbows resting on her knees, casual, as she sketches the tattoo I want on transfer paper. Our eyes meet, and I realize: Amar. Amar was aware during simulations, and now he’s dead. Amar was Divergent. And so am I. “Thanks for the vocabulary lesson,” I say. “No problem.” She returns to her drawing. “I’m getting the feeling you enjoy putting yourself through the wringer.” “So?” I say. “Nothing, it’s just a pretty Dauntless quality for someone who got an Abnegation result.