Stab Vest/standards

Famous quotes containing the words stab, vest and/or standards:

    As a particularly dramatic gesture, he throws wide his arms and whacks the side of the barn with the heavy cane he uses to stab at contesting bidders. With more vehemence than grammatical elegance, he calls upon the great god Caveat Emptor to witness with what niggardly stinginess these flinty sons of Scotland make cautious offers for what is beyond any question the finest animal ever beheld.
    —Administration in the State of Arka, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

    Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
    Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root,
    Casting the body’s vest aside,
    My soul into the boughs does glide:
    There, like a bird, it sits and sings,
    Then whets and combs its silver wings,
    And, till prepared for longer flights,
    Waves in its plumes the various light.
    Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)

    Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain’t-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on—our lost narcissism lives on—in our ego ideal.
    Judith Viorst (20th century)