Weekend Words: Nails
As reported this week in the New York Times, Governor Andrew Cuomo has ordered emergency measures to address wage theft and health hazards faced by the thousands of people who work in New York State’s nail salon industry
As reported this week in the New York Times, Governor Andrew Cuomo has ordered emergency measures to address wage theft and health hazards faced by the thousands of people who work in New York State’s nail salon industry.
I’m never going to accomplish anything; that’s perfectly clear to me. I’m never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don’t do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that anymore.
—Dorothy Parker, “The Little Hours”
Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don’t. Some writers write licking their finger.
—Italo Calvino
Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.
—Denis Diderot
I am a painter and I nail my pictures together.
—Kurt Schwitters, quoted in Raoul Haussmann’s Courier Dada
To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.
—Abraham Maslow
A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit.
—Erasmus
No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean fingernails.
—John Mortimer, Voyage Round My Father
The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.
—Henry Miller
History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below.
—Voltaire
But keep the wolf far hence that’s foe to men,
For with his nails he’ll dig them up again.
—John Webster, The White Devil
Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.
—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
