What I mean by that is that you have to understand the world you live in, and you should be a little splinter that mirrors the world.
Could a man really be plucked from the body of life like a little splinter and just blow away and leave no trace?" Paul dedicates himself to what he calls the "dialysis of good deeds".
For another, Maxon is worryingly far from home, and like any other human who's been carried beyond the Earth's gravitational pull, "a few pulsing cells" inside a "crazy little splinter of metal," he may not make it back to terra firma, much less return in time to drive Sunny to the delivery room.
As we age we are visited by little splinters and shards of what awaits us in the form of illnesses and infirmities, and for those who are diagnosed with medical certainty rather than vague promise, death itself comes knocking at the door.
One short flight of stairs away, up behind the balding red velvet of the Balcony curtain, the usherette was yawning, dandling her off torch, leaning on her elbow above the rustlings and tonguings of the back row and picking at the wood of the partition, flicking little splinters of it at the small-town heads in the dark.
Of course there is much in life to be cheerful about -- a loving wife, wonderful children, extended family, friends, Altoids -- but it's never easy to keep those little splinters of negativity picked up on the handrail of life from becoming infected.
When I first heard this track by Dennis Bovell back in 1976, it completely and utterly dubbed my mind, it blew my brain into little dub splinters.
Enmeshed in and whipped along by bouts of sickness ("these wretched little black splinters mortality hits us with," as he described them to John Berryman, an equally learned, assiduous practitioner of the self-destructive arts), Lowell cracks up on the page as never before, desperate to make his life and writing cohere.
In the wake of thousands of little wooden splinters, we observe Seagate sticking its hairy arm out the driver's side window, fist clenched but for a solitary index finger pointing skyward, as if to say, "I'm number one".
But to Pelosi's supporters — and to those who may not count themselves as loyalists but also don't want to see a schism — there is little tolerance for splinter factions of any sort.
As he whipped it to the ground, little blue shards splintered onto the blue hardcourt, the latest victims of Roddick's frustration.
