Rattling Quotes

If a nation wants to live in peace with its neighbors, it doesn’t keep rattling the saber at them.

I walk into a kids’ store, and it’s amazing, the types of instruments – little squeaky things, rattling things, spinning tops.

People aren’t coming to me looking for political essays or polemic – they’re looking for a rattling good story.

If I get a song – a good song – I just sing it the way I hear it in my head. If anybody else wanted to add whistles and bells and chains rattling, that’s fine. Just not too much. I actually just do things as straight ahead as possible.

Most people prepare for travels by reading about their destination; it always seemed an odd approach to me. I find it much easier and more pleasant to focus with the sights and smells of a place rattling around in my mind.

Actually, I can write anywhere – airport lounges, in bed, on a rattling train going north.

Acting is probably what I’m best at, but there are certain stories kind of rattling around in my head that I like the idea of developing over time.

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds – the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.

It scares you: all the noise, the rattling, the shaking. But the look on everybody’s face when you’re finished and packing, it’s the best smile in the world; and there’s nobody hurt, and the well’s under control.

Just because the Americans are so good at rattling out accessible and cheap junk food, nobody looks twice when it comes to their food. But there are golden nuggets everywhere.

When you walk around, you have all this stuff rattling around in your head, things that have happened to you, things you have read. Life is just life, and you get what you get out of it.

Ned made a tremendous rattling, at which Bullet took fright, broke his bridle, and dashed off in grand style; and would have stopped all farther negotiations by going home in disgust, had not a traveller arrested him and brought him back; but Kit did not move.

Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

I’m the minority in my house sometimes. My wife is Swedish, and we go to Sweden and everyone is rattling off in Swedish. It’s like, ‘OK, I can just read a book.’

Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound: great debts are like cannon; of loud noise, but little danger.

I write for what’s left of the eight-year-old still rattling around inside my head.

Until we make campaigns affordable, then we’re going to have too many members of Congress out rattling the cup with special interest groups.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

Standing at my door, I heard the discharge of a gun, and in four or five seconds of time, after the discharge, the small shot came rattling about me, one or two of which struck the house; which plainly demonstrates that the velocity of sound is greater than that of a cannon bullet.

At sunset we are rattling through the streets of the little town of Cordova.

Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, it needs an angle, it needs a ‘sound bite.

Buying a car used to be an experience so soul-scorching, so confidence-splattering, so existentially rattling that an entire car company was based on the promise that you wouldn’t have to come in contact with it.

When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that’s all you are – a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.