Waiting Quotes (page 80)
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Uncle alone in the house with the children said he'd dress up to amuse them. After a long wait, as he did not appear, they went down and saw a masked man putting the table silver into a bag. 'Oh, Uncle,' they cried in delight. 'Yes, isn't my make-up good?' said Uncle, taking his mask off. Thus goes the Hegelian syllogism of humour. Thesis: Uncle made himself up as a burglar (a laugh for the children); antithesis: it WAS a burglar (a laugh for the reader); synthesis: it still was Uncle...
Vladimir Nabokov
What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
But other people fast or walk long pilgrimages to honor the spirit of what they believe makes our world whole and lovely. If we gardeners can, in the same spirit, put our heels to the shovel, kneel before a trench holding tender roots, and then wait three years for an edible incarnation of the spring equinox, who's to make the call between ridiculous and reverent?
Barbara Kingsolver
…”But on an occasion like this we must wait for sunset. Setting out in the right way is just as important as the opening lines in a book: they determine everything.” He sat in the sand next to Moominmamma. “Look at the boat,” he said. “Look at The Adventure. A boat by night is a wonderful sight. This is the way to start a new life, with a hurricane lamp shining at the top of the mast, and the coastline disappearing behind one as the whole world lies sleeping. Making a journey by night is more...
Tove Jansson
Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies...
Rebecca West
I was reading an old text on the exploits of Belgarath the Sorcerer, and I –“ Senji stopped, going very pale, turned, and gaped at Garion’s grandfather.
“It’s a terrible letdown, isn’t it?” Beldin said. “We always told him he ought to try to look more impressive.”
“You’re in no position to talk,” the old man said.
“You’re the one with the earthshaking reputation.” Beldin shrugged. “I’m just a flunky. I’m along for comic relief.”
“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you, Beldin?”
“I haven’t...
David Eddings
In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars.
Alice Hoffman
She returned many years later. So much time had passed that the smell of musk in the room had blended in with the smell of the dust, with the dry and tiny breath of the insects. I was alone in the house, sitting in the corner, waiting. And I had learned to make out the sound of rotting wood, the flutter of the air becoming old in the closed bedrooms. That was when she came.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez