Be able to back up a car for a considerable distance in a straight line and back out of a driveway.
When we have any function, whether it's language or vision or cognitive functions like memory, we aren't dealing with a straight line to the brain that says 'This is what I do.' The brain builds a network of connections, a network of neurons that have a particular role in that function.
When Dickens arrives in the United States in November of 1867, he's already in questionable health. So by the end of the trip, he was really in failing condition, and really, he would never recover completely after this point, and you could sort of draw a straight line to his ultimate decline and death.
I've learnt that your life is more interesting and fulfilling when you don't lead it in a straight line and you go off on zigzags. I've made it a rule that if life becomes too comfortable and easy, I'll disrupt it.
My only phobia is untidiness. My hair has to be neatly kept; my shoes are always clean. Everything has to be in a straight line, in its place.
Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.
Maybe I wasn't just the traditional-type person or whatever. I got to the top, but I got there maybe unconventionally. It wasn't just a straight line.
Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
I don't know many people, if any, who have had some straight line toward success. I mean, they start here, they work hard, they've got what it takes, and they just go straight to the top over some number of years. Most people get a little failure.
In general, the straight line of a joke sets up a premise, an expectation. Then the funny ending - the punch line - in a sense contradicts the original assumption by refusing to follow what had seemed a reasonable train of thought. Many jokes involve that simple matter of leaping outside what had appeared to be the rules of the game at the moment.
