When I observe Gram, I see how fragile the notion of tradition can be. If I take my eyes off the way she kneads her Easter bread, or if I fail to study the way she sews a seam in suede, or if I lose the mental image I have of her when she negotiates a better deal with a button salesman, somehow, the very essence of her will be lost. When she goes, the responsibility for carrying on will fall to me. My mother says I'm the keeper of the flame, because I work here, and because I choose to live here. A flame is a very fragile thing, too, and there are times when I wonder if I'm the on who can keep it going.

I fantasize the night sky to be like a cosmic blue print of my life as I close my eyes and unbutton my heart?. just in case anyone up there is listening.

My heart is small, like a love of buttons or black pepper.

My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions of people who hate you for what you are and you're likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks.

Most of what I say is complete truth. My edit button is broken.

It is the thought, not the incidentals of expression, that essentially makes an exposition unpopular. A systematic ribbon and button maker can become unpopular but essentially is not at all, inasmuch as he does not mean much by the very odd things he says (alas, and this is a popular art!). Socrates, on the other hand, was the most unpopular in Greece because he said the same thing as the simplest person but meant infinitely much by it. To be able to stick to one thing, to stick to it with ethical passion and undauntedness of spirit, to see the intrinsic duplexity of this one thought with the same impartiality, and at one and the same time to see the most profound earnestness and the greatest jest, the deepest tragedy and highest comedy?this is unpopular in any age for anyone who has not realized that immediacy is over. But neither can what is essentially unpopular be learned by rote. More on that later.

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

Claire was struggling through last summer's diary volume when Myrnin popped in through the portal, wearing a big floppy black hat and a kind of crazy/stylish pimp coat that covered him from neck to ankles, black leather gloves, and a black and silver walking stick with a dragon's head on it. And, on his lapel was a button that said, If you can read this, thank a teacher.

And Nate? You kiss like a slobbering dog, you have bad breath, and you wouldn't know how to punch the right buttons on a girl if we came with manuals. Happy Thanksgiving, Jackass.

If you die in an elevator, be sure to push the up button.

People usually asked her if she had a belly button. Of course she had a belly button. She couldn't explain how. She didn't really want to know.

"The door banged open, and Eve rushed out, flushed and mussed and still buttoning her shirt. 'It's not what you think,' she said. 'It was just-oh, okay, whatever, it was exactly what you think. Now

He'd changed since the last summer. Instead of Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, he wore a button-down shirt, khaki pants, and leather loafers. His sandy hair, which used to be so unruly, was now clipped short. He look like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college-age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.

Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. - Amir

At school there was an annual school disco and I'd be standing in my bedroom wondering what to wear for hours on end. Eventually I'd arrive at a decision that was just the most ridiculous costume you could have ever devised - I think it was probably knitted Christmas jumpers on top of buttoned-up white shirts.

All this technology has not changed the way NFL Films does business and our process. Yes with one touch of a button now you reach millions of people but it is still the same approach that my father and I started out with.

If it keeps up man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.

I hate ready-made suits button-down collars and sports shirts.

Ostensibly rigorous and realistic contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.

And we've got to ask ourselves some very serious questions as to whether or not certain religious leaders in terms of raising money - I hate to bring this up - are pushing hot buttons.

You may not like the humor but that is why every radio has an on-off button.

We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them.

I had a heartbreaking experience when I was 9. I always wanted to be a guard. The most wonderful girl in the world was a guard. When I got polio and then went back to school they made me a guard. A teacher took away my guard button.

Good music comes out of people playing together knowing what they want to do and going for it. You have to sweat over it and bug it to death. You can't do it by pushing buttons and watching a TV screen.