After Some Days Quotes & Sayings

On the flight over to Chicago, I thought of a story Mom had once told me from her days as a pediatric nurse.
"There was this little boy I was taking care of," she said "and he was terminally ill,and we all knew it,but he kept hanging on and hanging on. He wouldn't die, it was so sad.
And his parents were always there with him,giving him so much love and support,but he was in so much pain,and it really was,time for him to go.
So finally some of us nurses took his father aside and we told him, 'You have to tell your son it's okay for him to go. You have to give him permission.' And so the father took his son in his arms and he sat with him in a chair and held on to him and told him over and over, that it was okay for him to go,and,well,after a few moments,his son died. — Anthony Rapp

Have you heard about the morning after pill, or what I like to call breakfast in bed. Well have you heard about how some of the girls who have taken have died a few days later? Talk about two birds, looks like I will be going to the game this weekend boys. — Daniel Tosh

We were never a band that did 96 takes of the same thing. I had heard of groups that were into that kind of excess around that time. They'd work on the same track for three or four days and then work on it some more, but that's clearly not the way to record an album. If the track isn't happening and it creates some sort of psychological barrier, even after an hour or two, then you should stop and do something else. Go out: go to the pub, or a restaurant or something. Or play another song. — Jimmy Page

I just completed a tour in Europe. I played every night. This requires traveling some days for six hours in a van or a train or a car. After six weeks of that, I checked into the hotel and just fell apart. — Lee Konitz

Why is it that we claim to want certainty? Only fools and cowards seek certainty. Certainty is a dead end; it's a rich old widow living out the rest of her days on the Upper East Side with a little dog and big memories. Unless you are a senior citizen, you'll go nuts after a few weeks of knowing what the rest of your life will bring. You'll die of boredom. But uncertainty is what keeps us alive. It is that flip of a coin, that brief moment when it's in the air or spinning on its side, that snaps us out of our daily stasis. Some invisible Odds Gods are giving you a chance to become better, smarter, richer. What fun it is to get paid if you earned it by the skin of your teeth, by the close call. And how dreadful it is to shoot fish in a barrel. Exposure to uncertainty earns you membership in a select tribe: You are a Padawan mastering the Force. Once the trade is on, once the die has been cast, you're in a parallel, auspicious universe. — Katya G. Cohen

You'll come to my grave? To tell me your problems?"
My problems?
"Yes.'
And you'll give me answers?
"I'll give you what I can. Don't I always?"
I picture his grave, on the hill, overlooking the pond, some little nine foot piece of earth where they will place him, cover him with dirt, put a stone on top. Maybe in a few weeks? Maybe in a few days? I see myself sitting there alone, arms across my knees, staring into space.
It won't be the same, I say, not being able to hear you talk.
"Ah, talk ... "
He closes his eyes and smiles.
"Tell you what. After I'm dead, you talk. And I'll listen. — Mitch Albom

So I punished myself instead. I gave myself the worst punishment I could think of: I decided to live and I decided to stop drinking." "And afterward?" "I got to my feet again and started working. Worked longer days than all the others. Trained. Went on long walks. Read books. Some on law. Stopped meeting bad friends. Good ones too, by the way. The ones I had left after all the boozing. I don't know why in fact, it was like a big cleanup. Everything in my old life had to go, good as well as bad. One day I sat down and rang round all those I thought I had known in my former life and said: 'Hi, we can't meet anymore. It was nice knowing — Jo Nesbo

So am I dead? How many kinds of living and dead and living dead and dead living had I been in just these few months, these few days, after the stasis of plain old human living and dying? I deserved some kind of existential medal. — Joan Frances Turner

The number seven is magical, they say. Seven years 'til our cells completely regenerate. Seven years 'til Jacob possesses Rachel, no, Leah, and seven more for Rachel. Seven days in a week. Post traumatic stress often resolves itself in toto only after seven full years have passed. Such is the case for some brain trauma patients too. Seven. It's a number worth remembering. — Chila Woychik

I realize that the English language is sadly devoid of names for people like me. I try to cut the world some slack for this every day. All day. And the day after that, too. But the truth is that every time I am misgendered, a tiny little sliver of me disappears, A tiny little sliver of me is reminded that I do not fit ... I remember that the truth of me is invisible, and a tiny little sliver of me disappears. Just a sliver, razored from the surface of my very thick skin most days, but other times right from my soul, sometimes felt so deep and other days simply shrugged off, but still. All those slivers add up to something much harder to pretend around. — Ivan E. Coyote

After spending 460 days as a hostage, I did emerge a fundamentally changed person. But I think, like everyone does as they grow older and probably wiser, I can look back at my earlier life - my history, my mistakes, the joy I felt as a young woman traveling the world - with some objectivity and even some humor. — Amanda Lindhout

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway. — Henry James

After wishing for years to be given-the-opportunity of filming some of the more 'mystical' occupations of our Times - some of the more obscure Public Figures which the average imagination turns into 'bogeymen' ... viz.: Policemen, Doctors, Soldiers, Politicians, etc.: - I was at last permitted to ride in a Pittsburgh police car, camera in hand, the final several days of September 1970. — Stan Brakhage

Billy was unconscious for two days after that, and he dreamed millions of things, some of them true. The true things were time-travel. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I used to wish I had an easier life," he mused. "Some families sail through years with nothing touching them. They have no tragedies. They go on about how lucky they are. Yet sometimes it seems to me they're half alive. When something goes wrong for them, and it does for everyone sooner or later, their trauma is much worse. They've had nothing bad happen to them before. In the meantime, they think little problems, like losing a wallet, are big deals. They think it's ruined their day. They have no idea what a hard day's like. It's going to be incredibly tough for them when they find out."
He'd also developed his own version of making the most of every minute. "Through Sam I found out how quickly things can change. Because of him I've learned to appreciate each moment and try not to hold on to things. Life's more exciting and intense that way. It's like the yogurt that goes off after three days. It tastes so much better than the stuff that lasts three weeks. — Helen Brown

Tell you what," I said. "After the testing after the Demon Days, when things settle down -"
"Things won't settle down."
"- I'm going to take you to the mall."
She blinked. "The mall? For what reason?"
"To hang out," I said. "We'll get some hamburgers. See a movie."
Zia hesitated. "Is this what you'd call a 'date'?"
My expression must have been priceless, because Zia actually cracked a smile. "You look like a cow hit with a shovel. — Rick Riordan

A lover should die after a long lifetime. I lost Hitoshi at the age of twenty, and I suffered from it so much that I felt as if my own life had stopped. The night he died, my soul went away to some other place and I couldn't bring it back. It was impossible to see the world as I had before. My brain ebbed and flowed, unstable, and I passed the days in a relentless state of dull oppression. — Banana Yoshimoto

Some days, I believe the Christian story even more than I believe in Australia. After all, I have never been to Australia, it is just a picture on a map. I don't know if I will ever go there, but I know that eventually I am going to Glory.
Living the Christian life, however, is not about that Australia kind of believing. It is about a promise to believe even when you don't. — Lauren F. Winner

Several days after Mary broke the alabaster box and poured the ointment on Jesus' head, there were some women who went early in the morning to anoint the body of the Lord. Did they do it? Did they succeed in their purpose on that first day of the week? No, there was only one soul who succeeded in anointing the Lord, and it was Mary, who anointed Him beforehand. The others never did it, for He had risen. Now I suggest that in just such a way the matter of time may be important to us also, and that the whole question for us is: what am I doing to the Lord today? — Watchman Nee

The consultant buys a bottle of fake blood at a theater supply store and once every lunar month, for four days, imitates having a period by putting some of this blood into the vagina and preventing it from gushing out by using a tampon. After repeating this for four months, the consultant's period will return to normal. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Looping. Some days are so dark I can't see anything but a miserable fog of number after number, word after word, clouds of verbs and nouns and none of them the ones that will make time go backward. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I hesitated for just a moment. Some part of me wanted to see the creature, after having heard it for so many days. Was it the remnants of the scientist in me, trying to regroup, trying to apply logic when all that mattered was survival? If so, it was a very small part. I ran. — Jeff VanderMeer

On April 18, 1906, when that earthquake hit San Francisco and took David from her, Vivien began to speak the language of grief. She understood that grief is not neat and orderly; it does not follow any rules. Time does not heal it. Rather, time insists on passing, and as it does, grief changes but does not go away. Sometimes she could actually visualize her grief. It was a wave, a tsunami that came unexpectedly and swept her away. She could see it, a wall of pain that had grabbed hold of her and pulled her under. Some days, she could reach the air and breathe in huge comforting gulps. Some days she barely broke the surface, and still, after all this time, some days it consumed her and she wondered if there was any way free of it. — Ann Hood

In other words each of those calm and melancholy days on which I did not see her, coming one after the other without interruption, continuing too without prescription (unless some busy-body were to meddle in my affairs), was a day not lost but gained. Gained to no purpose, it might be, for presently they would be able to pronounce that I was healed. Resignation, modulating our habits, allows certain elements of our strength to be indefinitely increased. Those - so wretchedly inadequate - that I had had to support my grief, on the first evening of my rupture with Gilberte, had since multiplied to an incalculable power. — Marcel Proust

I had an interview once with some German journalist - some horrible, ugly woman. It was in the early days after the communists - maybe a week after - and she wore a yellow sweater that was kind of see-through. She had huge tits and a huge black bra, and she said to me, 'It's impolite; remove your glasses.' I said, 'Do I ask you to remove your bra? — Karl Lagerfeld

Some people work very closely with a director or a producer on something, and from the get go, they're collaborating. But typically, it's just go in for an audition, do the best you can, and if the phone rings a couple of days after the audition and you get the part, that's great. — Roger Craig Smith

I thought I'd be reading a new book today, but it doesn't feel right, or I don't feel like it. Some days are not new-book days. After — Rabih Alameddine

I am a woman after all, so some days I feel good and sexy in a bikini, and other days, I'm like, 'Where are my caftans?!' — Behati Prinsloo

All of the casual conversation openings I'd been practicing in my head, as I trudged through the basic tasks in the lab, were instantly forgotten when I saw Cassie. She looked beautiful and for some reason, today of all days, after I'd been so careful, I let myself be honest.
"Beautiful," I murmured, not quietly enough that she wouldn't hear me now that I was so close. — Melanie Cusick-Jones

I can't get why people are afraid of books or films which are horror. What's the scary of the film "Cube 1,2,3" - Yeah it was brutal I get scary, but after an hour I'm fine. I just continue to live my life. I check out "Saw", the most brutal film ever watched, yeah I could have some kind a bad thoughts and other stuff about the film. Like to think that this guy "Saw", is there with the bike, but after few days everything it went on the right path. I had chance to see what is the real face of the killers - "Saw" and what does goverment do "Cube"!

GreenMile was a sad story, I still can't believe that Stephen King has written it! — Deyth Banger

This is much worse than losing a cat. You do not wish the cat dead, for example, after the first two days. You still love the cat and presumably the cat still loves you, or some variation of love that may in fact be dependence and even indifference. — Suzanne Finnamore

Kid, let me tell you something. Most people spend their short time in this world less than half alive. They wander through their days in a haze of responsibility and resentment. Something happens to them not long after they're born. They get conflicted about what they want and start worshiping the wrong gods. Should. Mercy. Equality. Altruism. There's nothing you should do. Do what you want. Mercy isn't Nature's way. She's an equal opportunity killer. We aren't born the same. Some are stronger, faster. Never apologize for it. Altruism is an impossible concept. There's no action you can make that doesn't spring from how you want to feel about yourself. — Karen Marie Moning

But I just needed her so much and it never felt like enough and she wasn't consistent and her inconsistency and my insecurity were this horrible match for each other, but I still loved her, because all of me was wrapped up in her, because I'd put all my eggs in someone else's basket, and in the end, after 343 days, I was left with an empty basket and this gnawing endless hole in my gut, but then now I find myself deciding to remember her as a good person with whom I had some good times until we, both of us, got ourselves into an ineradicably bad situation. — John Green

Yeah, well, you clearly also couldn't be bothered to call me and tell me you were shacking up with some dyed-blond wanna-be goth you probably met at Pandemonium. After I spent the past three days wondering if you were dead."
"I was not shacking up," Clary said, glad of the darkness as the blood rushed to her face.
"And my hair is naturally blond," said Jace. "Just for the record."
Simon, Clary, and Jace, pg. 115 — Cassandra Clare

What does somebody like you want? More power? More toys? More sex?"
"All of the above. All the time."
"Greedy bugger."
"Kid, let me tell you something. Most people spend their short time in this world less than half alive. They wander through their days in a haze of responsibility and resentment. Something happens to them not long after they're born. They get conflicted about what they want and start worshipping the wrong gods. Should. Mercy. Equality. Altruism. There's nothing you should do. Do what you want. Mercy isn't Nature's way. She's an equal opportunity killer. We aren't born the same. Some are stronger, smarter, faster. Never apologize for it. Altruism is an impossible concept. There's no action you can make that doesn't spring from how you want to feel about yourself. Not greedy, Dani. Alive. And happy about it every single fucking day. — Karen Marie Moning

we refer to the Middle Ages as ages of faith; a time in which men believed a heavenly Jerusalem above the sky much as they believed an earthly Sion beyond the sea; when the whole of their thought was of a piece with their theology...those were days when a thoughtful soul here or there could realize some unity of mental vision. The fact should be admitted, however we regard it - whether as the stultifying tyranny of dogma or as an enviable single-mindedness; an ideal too easily realized, no doubt, in a plentiful dearth of empirical knowledge, and yet establishing a standard after which perplexed modernity may strive. — Jocelyn Gibb

A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, 'Everything is possible again.' It was the perfect thing to write because that was exactly how it felt. — Jonathan Safran Foer

IMAGINE YOU ARE Siri Keeton. You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate, flesh peels apart from flesh, ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. You'd scream if you had the breath. — Peter Watts

Some days I spent up to three hours in the arcade after school, dimly aware that we were the first people, ever, to be doing these things. We were feeling something they never had - a physical link into the world of the fictional - through the skeletal muscles of the arm to the joystick to the tiny person on the screen, a person in an imagined world. It was crude but real. We'd fashioned an outpost in the hostile, inaccessible world of the imagination, like dangling a bathysphere into the crushing dark of the deep ocean, a realm hitherto inaccessible to humankind. This is what games had become. Computers had their origin in military cryptography - in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression. We'd done that, taken that idea and turned it into a thing its creators never imagined, our own incandescent mythology. — Austin Grossman

It is trite to speak of a broken heart. Hearts are not broken; they continue to beat, the blood still courses, even in the bitter after-days of betrayal. but something is broken when pain beyond words is suffered; some connection that formerly existed with light and hope and bright mornings is severed, and can never be restored. — Michael Cox

After a great loss, after a difficult victory, after suffering extreme trauma, she wished she could have some time to hibernate. Not two days. Two years. Some serious time to pull herself together. Why did life always have to roll relentlessly forward? Why was every victory or defeat followed by new works and new problems? — Brandon Mull

Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millenia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to 'hasten the inevitable,' not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion. — Daniel Dennett

They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn't be too much education wasted. — Terry Pratchett

And while we've got you on the table, we can do a little lipo on the thighs. You barely need anything. But a lot of women these days are doing that and then having some of the fat injected into their labia to plump things up down there." Yes. So Rachel can enjoy that for years to come, because what woman doesn't fret over this? After all, don't we all walk around with mirrors in our panties, making sure our labia looks plump enough? I try to fix my face, but I'm fairly sure my disgust shows. "We can even do a little vaginal tightening to enhance sexual pleasure for both you and your husband." My sister bursts into tears. Thank God. — Kristan Higgins

The boss had a long list of reasons for letting me go
most of which, I am ashamed to admit, were generously understated. It's true, for instance, that I hogged the photocopier for hours on end and snapped at whoever politely
deferentially
inquired about how much longer I would be. I was intent on achieving definitively sooty, penumbral effects to ensure that copies looked like copies, and that, of course, took time. Some days I spent entire afternoons reproducing blank sheets of paper, ream after ream, to use instead of the "FROM THE DESK OF
" notepads the boss kept ordering for each of us. — Gary Lutz

I let her know that I expected as much money with their daughter as would pay off my remaining debt for the printing-house, which I believe was not then above a hundred pounds. She brought me word they had no such sum to spare; I said they might mortgage their house in the loan-office. The answer to this, after some days, was, that they did not approve the match; that, on inquiry of Bradford, they had been inform'd the printing business was not a profitable one; the types would soon be worn out, and more wanted; that S. Keimer and D. Harry had failed one after the other, and I should probably soon follow them; and, therefore, I was forbidden the house, and the daughter shut up. — Various

At some point they show their true colors
After the break up
After the trial
After the contract is signed and broken
Their true colors stink
These days
I find it hard to get along with them
I want to push them until the colors come out
And sometimes I hate them so much, I push and see
I do the same to the ones I like
The ones I don't care about
I smile at real nice — Henry Rollins

Some of the greatest survivors have been women. Look at the courage so many women have shown after surviving earthquakes in the rubble for days on end. — Bear Grylls

Being uncertain and scared and riddled with doubt some days isn't a sign of bad things to come. It's actually quite the opposite. After all, if great things weren't on the horizon, I don't think the enemy would be so bent on attacking us. — Lysa TerKeurst

It's Saturday; a day off, or it's not; maybe it's a day off connected to countless days off. Some are secure, some not, some wonder. But there's a common thread; each of us having purpose; some living after learning it, some learning while living it, some looking. We are all connected in purpose, all of us loved equally by a race and gender-blind Christ walking with us in that purpose. — Lee Goff

After reading ... accounts ... of minor accidents of light, it is little wonder that the average man would far rather watch someone else fly and read of the narrow escapes from death when some pilot has had a forced landing or a blowout, than to ride himself. Even in the postwar days of now obsolete equipment, nearly all of the serious accidents were caused by inexperienced pilots who where then allowed to fly or attempt to fly-without license or restrictions about anything they could coax into the air. — Charles Lindbergh

Sometimes I wander round and round in circles, going over the same ground, getting lost, sometimes for hours, or days, or even weeks ... But I know that if I immerse myself in it long enough, things will clarify, simplify. I can count on that. When it happens, it happens fast. Boom ba boom ba boom! One thing after the other, taking the breath away. And then, you know, I feel like I'm walking out in some remote corner of space, where no mortal's ever been, all alone with something beautiful ... Once, when I was in Switzerland some friends took me up in some very high cable cars, climbing up a mountain ... There was a restaurant on top and the view was supposed to be sublime. When we got up it was a great disappointment because the clouds were obscuring everything. But suddenly there was a rent in the clouds and there were the Jungrau and two other peaks towering right in front of us ... That's what it's like. — Steven Pinker

Did they all live happily ever after?
They did not. No one ever does, in spite of what the stories may say. They had their good days, as you do, and they had their bad days, and you know about those. They had their victories, as you do, and they had their defeats, and you know about those, too. There were times when they felt ashamed of themselves, knowing that they had not done their best, and there were times when they knew they had stood where their God had meant them to stand. All I'm trying to say is that they lived as well as they could, each and every one of them; some lived longer than others, but all lived well, and bravely, and I love them all, and am not ashamed of my love. — Stephen King

You cannot cook and you cannot sew. Tell me, Jessica, are you good for aught besides making my life hell?" Well, that certainly put her in her place. She rose. "You know what they say about guests and fish after three days," she said, starting toward the door. "I'll be going now." Where, she didn't know, but she could work that out later. "I did not give you permission to depart," he said curtly. "You may still sleep in my bed. I will sleep there as well - " "Wait a minute," she interrupted. "I never agreed to - " "You will remain unmolested," he said curtly. "There is only one bed and we have shared it the past two days." "Yeah, and you were feverish." "We will put a bolster of some sort between us," he said, through gritted teeth. "I will not touch you, since you seem to find the thought so repugnant." She had no answer for that. It was much too complicated for a quick fix. "You will retire now," he said, pointing again toward the bed. "In silence. — Lynn Kurland

The trumpet player, Ronnie Hughes, has still got his chops today but for some strange reason the culture doesn't call him because he's 83-years-old. And these people are in their 70s and 80s and 90s and came with such verve every day and would still be shooting these 10 and 12 hour days. So, that in itself made this an extraordinarily special occasion for all of us. It wasn't a job for the crew after a few days, it took on another tone. — Dustin Hoffman

Later in life, when I'm retired and have a family of my own and will be able to send my kids to college, that's when I'll start spending. Way too many athletes go broke these days, and I like saving my money so that I can ensure my family and friends currently and after me will never have to endure some of the things I did when I was a kid. — Victor Ortiz

It took one long, desperate week to prove just how wrong was my prophecy.
"The revolution is not over," Branaric said seriously some ten days later.
But even this--after a long, horrible day of real fighting, a desperate run back into the familiar hills of Tlanth, and the advent of rain beating on the tent over our heads--failed to keep Branaric serious for long. His mouth curved wryly as he added, "And today's action was not a rout, it was a retreat."
"So we will say outside this tent." Khesot paused to tap his pipeweed more deeply into the worn bowl of his pipe, then he looked up, his white eyebrows quirked. "But it was a rout."
I said indignantly, "Our people fought well!"
Khesot gave a stately, measured nod in my direction, without moving from his cushion. "Valiantly, Lady Meliara, valiantly. But courage is not enough when we are so grossly outnumbered. More so now that they have an equally able commander. — Sherwood Smith

There are kinds of human problems which really do seem, as our tidy expressions would have it, to "come to a head" and "demand to be dealt with." But there are also problems, often just as serious, which come to nothing that we can recognize or openly deal with. Some long-lived, insidious problems simply slip us off to one side of ourselves. Some gently rob us of just enough energy or faith so that days which once took place on a horizontal plane become an endless series of uphill slogs. And some - like high water working year after year at the roots of a riverside tree - quietly undercut our trust or our hope, our sense of place, or of humor, our ability to empathize, or to feel enthused, and we don't sense impending danger, we don't feel the damage at all, till one day, to our amazement, we find ourselves crashing to the ground. — David James Duncan

IN 1953, STANLEY Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, took two flasks - one containing a little water to represent a primeval ocean, the other holding a mixture of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulphide gases to represent Earth's early atmosphere - connected them with rubber tubes, and introduced some electrical sparks as a stand-in for lightning. After a few days, the water in the flasks had turned green and yellow in a hearty broth of amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, and other organic compounds. "If God didn't do it this way," observed Miller's delighted supervisor, the Nobel laureate Harold Urey, "He missed a good bet. — Bill Bryson

It is the "where I am" that makes heaven. The life after death might become through its very endlessness a burden to our spirits, if it were not to be filled with the infinite variety and freshness of God's love. Some have shrunk from its very infinitude, because they have not realized what God's love can make of it. Human love helps us to understand this. When we have come to love any one with all our power of affection, then there is no monotony or weariness in the days and hours we spend with them. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that's my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I'm going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that's the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket's going to have some water in it. — John McPhee

So three days before the millennium, Bianca called. "D'ya wanna go to the White House with Trisha and me?" By Trisha, she meant country singer Trisha Yearwood, whose record label, MCA, she'd recently been hired to work at. "When would that be, exactly?" I asked. "For that Millennium Concert at the Lincoln Memorial. There's a party at the White House after and all." She always talked like she was chewing gum between words. "They're flying us there in a private jet. Ya don't need to write about it. Just come as Trisha's guest. It'll be fun." "Shit, I'm supposed to go ice-skating with some guys who think the world's going to end. Give me a day to figure things out and I'll get right back to you. — Neil Strauss

But here Billy Chope arrived to demand what the 'ell Sam Cardew was doing with his gal. Now Sam was ever readier for a fight than Billy was; but the sum of Billy's half pints was large: wherefore the fight began. On the skirt of a hilarious ring Lizerunt, after some small outcry, triumphed aloud. Four days before, she had no bloke; and here she stood with two, and those two fighting for her! Here in the public gaze, on the Flats! For almost five minutes she was Helen of Troy. — Arthur Morrison

Because after a couple days of this fabulous invisible room-cleaning, I start to wonder how exactly Petra knows when I'm in 1009 and when I'm not. It's now that it occurs to me how rarely I ever see her. For a while I try experiments like all of a sudden darting out into the 10-Port hallway to see if I can see Petra hunched somewhere keeping track of who is decabining, and I scour the whole hallway-and-ceiling area for evidence of some kind of camera or monitor tracking movements outside the cabin doors - zilch on both fronts. But then I realize that the mystery's even more complex and unsettling than I'd first thought, because my cabin gets cleaned always and only during intervals where I'm gone more than half an hour. When I go out, how can Petra or her supervisors possibly know how long I'm going to be gone? — David Foster Wallace

Me?" he said in some surprise. "I won't be dancing! It's the bridal dance. The bride and groom dance alone!"
For one circuit of the room," she told him. "After which they are joined by the best man and first bridesmaid, then by the groomsman and the second bridesmaid."
Will reacted as he had been stung. He leaned over to speak across Jenny on his left, to Gilan.
Gil! Did you know we have to dance?" he asked. Gilan nodded enthusiastically.
Oh yes indeed. Jenny and I have been practicing for the past three days, haven't we, Jen?"
Jenny looked up at him adoringly and nodded. Jenny was in love. Gilan was tall, dashing, good-looking, charming and very ammusing. Plus he was cloaked in the mystery and romance tat came with being a Ranger. Jenny had only ever known one ranger and that had been grim-faced, gray-bearded Halt. — John Flanagan

Nora sobered and turned back to the windows, her breath fogging the glass. "We may as well lay some ground rules if we're going to be stuck here for a few days."
"Okay."
"You can keep the bed, I prefer the sofa. I don't cook. I'm not a maid, so pick up after yourself. You can eat whatever you can find in the kitchen, but I'll warn you, I don't keep much. I prefer my privacy, so you'll have to occupy yourself. Any questions?
"Only one."
She turned to face him.
"What are you hiding from? — Jennifer Lowery

It is for this girl that the young man is looking. Day after day he wakes in morning and goes searching for her. In his work, and in his life on mornings that are not miraculous and afternoons that are sundry and various, he saves the corners of his eyes for her, and watches at all times the entrances and exits of every establishment to which he comes. For he knows that eventually, in time and given some protracted period of days, weeks, and months, he will come up on her, and know her in an instant for who she is. — Jesse Ball

Some minutes or hours or days later, when I lay boneless and well satisfied, Ethan raised his gaze to mine again. His eyes were silver, his fangs descended. "There is no going back," he said, "Not after this. — Chloe Neill

Time did a funny thing after, some days slipping away without notice while others stretched on endlessly. — Jen Nadol

In an autobiographical essay published in 1946, Albert Einstein reflected on his days as a student of physics some fifty years earlier. He recalled his teachers with affection but, referring to exams, said, This coercion had such a deterring effect that after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year. — Alfie Kohn

If I owned any of these Hot New Issues that have doubled, tripled, quintupled or umptupled within days and in some cases hours after they were issued, I most certainly would grab my fabulous windfall, thank my lucky stars and invest the money. It's utter nonsense to think any newly issued stock is really worth two, ten or 20 times the [offering] price ... A management so stupid as to sell shares [cheap], and an underwriter so obtuse as not to discern the real value, together would provide reason enough for a sensible man to get rid of his shares. — Malcolm Forbes

As time passed there was no more buying food, no money, no supplies. On some days, we wouldn't even have a crumb to eat. There's a vivid scene in Nanni Loy's The Four Days of Naples, a movie made after the war about the uprising of the Neapolitans against the occupying Germans, in which one of the young characters sinks his teeth into a loaf of bread so voraciously, so desperately, I can still identify with him. In those four famous days in late September, when Naples rose up against the Germans - even before the Allies arrived, it was the climax of a terrible period of deprivation and marked the beginning of the end of the war in Italy. — Sophia Loren

Little sleep, no investment portfolio, no family around, no hot water. On an evening a few days after arriving in Cange, I wondered aloud what compensation he got for these various hardships. He told me, "If you're making sacrifices, unless you're automatically following some rule, it stands to reason that you're trying to lessen some psychic discomfort. So, for example, if I took steps to be a doctor for those who don't have medical care, it could be regarded as a sacrifice, but it could also be regarded as a way to deal with ambivalence." He went on, and his voice changed a little. He didn't bristle, but his tone had an edge: "I feel ambivalent about selling my services in a world where some can't buy them. You can feel ambivalent about that, because you should feel ambivalent. Comma." This was for me one of the first of many encounters with Farmer's — Tracy Kidder

Fifteen days after we are born, we begin to discriminate between colors. For the rest of our lives, barring blunted or blinded sight, we find ourselves face-to-face with all these phenomena at once, and we call the whole shimmering mess "color." You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we "get around" in the world. Some might also call it the source of our suffering. — Maggie Nelson

Perhaps I'll seduce you in the future, after some other men have taken the trouble to educate you."
"I doubt it," she said sullenly. "I would never be so bourgeois as to sleep with my own husband."
A catch of laughter escaped him. "My God. You must have been waiting for days to use that one. Congratulations, child. We haven't yet been married a week, and you're already learning how to fight. — Lisa Kleypas

She, with her affection and her gaiety, had been largely responsible for him having rediscovered the meaning of life, her love had driven him to the far corners of the Earth, because he needed to be rich enough to buy some land and live in peace with her for the rest of their days. It was his utter confidence in this fragile creature, that had made him fight with honor, because he knew that after a battle he could forget all the horrors of war in her arms, and that, despite all the women he had known, only there in her arms could he close his eyes and sleep like a child. — Paulo Coelho

This creature's career could produce but one result, and it speedily followed. Boy after boy managed to get on the river. The minister's son became an engineer. The doctor's and the post-master's sons became 'mud clerks;' the wholesale liquor dealer's son became a barkeeper on a boat; four sons of the chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge, became pilots. Pilot was the grandest position of all. The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary - from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay. Two months of his wages would pay a preacher's salary for a year. Now some of us were left disconsolate. We could not get on the river - at least our parents would not let us. — Mark Twain

Amy will be fine. Amy ... " Here was where I should have said, "Amy loves Mom." But I couldn't tell Go that Amy loved our mother, because after all that time, Amy still barely knew our mother. Their few meetings had left them both baffled. Amy would dissect the conversations for days after - "And what did she mean by ... " - as if my mother were some ancient peasant tribeswoman arriving from the tundra with an armful of raw yak meat and some buttons for bartering, trying to get something from Amy that wasn't on offer. — Gillian Flynn

I had been for some hours extremely pressed by the necessities of nature; which was no wonder, it being almost two days since I had last disburdened myself. I was under great difficulties between urgency and shame. The best expedient I could think of, was to creep into my house, which I accordingly did; and shutting the gate after me, I went as far as the length of my chain would suffer, and discharged my body of that uneasy load. — Jonathan Swift

Dreams are associated with a state called REM sleep, the abbreviation standing for rapid eye movement. The REM state is strongly correlated with sexual arousal. Experiments have been performed in which sleeping subjects are awakened whenever REM state emerges, while members of a control group are awakened just as often each night but not when they're dreaming. After some days, the control group is a little groggy, but the experimental group - the ones who are prevented from dreaming - is hallucinating in daytime. It's not that a few people with a particular abnormality can be made to hallucinate in this way; anyone is capable of hallucinations. — Carl Sagan

Good day, ladies," he said with a distinctly American accent when all the women were above decks and the hatches closed. With a grin that took some of the edge off his fierce looks, he surveyed the crowd and added, "We've come to rescue you."
His words were so unexpected, so completely self-assured that Sara bristled. After all his blatant methods of intimidation, after he'd stood there surveying the women like cattle before the slaughter, he had the audacity to say such a thing!
"Is that what they're calling thievery, pillage, and rape these days?" she snapped. — Sabrina Jeffries

I became the person people don't want to tell they're pregnant. I hate that. A friend told me her happy, fantastic news, and just a second later she burst out crying, afraid for how this would make me feel. I hate that. I work really hard to arrange my face in such a way that approximates uncomplicated glee. And I am happy for them, or course. But sometimes just after the happiness is the desperation. Some days are easier than others. — Shauna Niequist

And one asks oneself where are one's dreams. And one shakes one's head and says how rapidly the years fly by! And again one asks oneself what has one done with one's years. Where have you buried your best days? Have you lived or not? Look, one says to oneself, look how cold the world is growing. Some more years will pass, and after them will come gloomy solitude; then will come old age trembling on its crutch, and after it misery and desolation. Your fantastic world will grow pale, your dreams will fade and die and will fall like yellow leaves from the trees. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

On the day after Christmas, some store or another will always take out and ad saying there are only 364 shopping days to Christmas. No one is amused. — Gerard Del Re

In the months and years after 9/11 it appeared likewise as if things had returned to some state of normalcy. As time passed, as the initial shock wore off and the trauma lessened, there was a growing temptation to go on almost as if it had never happened, as if the nation were still somehow immune to destruction. So it was in the last days of ancient Israel. But it was all an illusion." There was a long silence after that ... broken only by the sound of the seagulls. Then he continued as if there had been no break. "It was all a fatal illusion. So then ... what of America? — Jonathan Cahn

Time is only an idea. There is only the Reality Whatever you
think it is, it looks like that. If you call it time, it is time. If you
call it existence, it is existence, and so on. After calling it time, you
divide it into days and nights, months, years, hours, minutes, etc.
Time is immaterial for the Path of Knowledge. But some of these
rules and discipline are good for beginners. — Ramana Maharshi

beyond their right - and now they would be made to pay for it. Envy was being acted out, as never before.'62 It led to the murder of six million Jews in the Second World War. Today, I find envy laced through the statements of European and Indian intellectuals about America. Arundhati Roy's essay after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington is an example. Like many anti-American intellectuals writing in the days after the attack, Roy claimed that it was the direct result of American foreign policy - the implication being that America somehow deserved what had happened. There is widespread anti-American sentiment in the world which regards the United States as arrogant, indifferent to human suffering, consumerist, and contemptuous of international law. Much of this is probably correct, but I find that some of it is inspired by envy of America's success. — Gurcharan Das

For in the latter days of that passionate life that lay now so far behind him, the conception of a free and equal manhood had become a very real thing to him. He had hoped, as indeed his age had hoped, rashly taking it for granted, that the sacrifice of the many to the few would some day cease, that a day was near when every child born of woman should have a fair and assured chance of happiness. And here, after two hundred years, the same hope, still unfulfilled, cried passionately through the city. After two hundred years, he knew, greater than ever, grown with the city to gigantic proportions, were poverty and helpless labour and all the sorrows of his time. — H.G.Wells

They came here on Sunday, 30th June, 1940, after bombing us two days before. They said they hadn't meant to bomb us; they mistook our tomato lorries on the pier for army trucks. How they came to think that strains the mind. They bombed us, killing some thirty men, women, and children - one among them was my cousin's boy. He had sheltered underneath his lorry when he first saw the planes dropping bombs, and it exploded and caught fire. They killed men in their lifeboats at sea. They strafed the Red Cross ambulances carrying our wounded. When no one shot back at them, they saw the British had left us undefended. They just flew in peaceably two days later and occupied us for five years. — Mary Ann Shaffer

Love heals the body. Look at any woman on the day after she was made love to by a man she adores, and who adores her too. A man's body might register a difference, but a woman's body literally transforms in ways a man's does not seem to do. Our breasts, our skin, not to mention our faces, are filled with some voluptuous spirit. Both men and women walk a little bit above the sidewalk on days that follow our better nights. If there was enough happy sex in America, our crime level would be cut dramatically. We — Marianne Williamson

How can you begin to uncover whether gluten sensitivity is causing some of your health issues? Symptoms occur shortly after eating gluten and improve or disappear within hours or days after gluten is withdrawn. Symptoms return again if gluten is reintroduced. — Kris Carr

Where have I been? she wondered. Is a life that can now be considered an absence a life?

For some time things had been going badly for her. She could cite nothing in particular as a problem; rather, it was as if life in general had a grudge against her. Things persisted in turning grey. Although at first she had revelled in the erudite seclusion of her job, in the protection against the vulgarities of the world that it offered, after five years she now felt that in some way it had aged her disproportionately, that she was as old as the yellowed papers she spent her days unfolding. When, very occasionally, she raised her eyes from the past and surveyed the present, it faded from her view and became as ungraspable as a mirage. Although she had discussed this with the Director, who had waved away her condition of mind as an occupational hazard, she was still not satisfied that this was how the only life she had been offered should be lived. — Marian Engel

Now here it was after all, preserved by some considerate hand with varnisch and wax. Preserved along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn't even known it was there. Because, unfamiliar with the abscence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify it's presence.
Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.
I felt fear's echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its accompanient and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like Northern Lights across black sky — John Knowles

Too cold even to snow - that winter presents a strange and haunted season during which Werner prowls the static like he used to prowl the alleys with Jutta, pulling her in the wagon through the colonies of Zollverein. A voice materializes out of the distortion in his headphones, then fades, and he goes ferreting after it. There, thinks Werner when he finds it again, there: a feeling like shutting your eyes and feeling your way down a mile-long thread until your fingernails find the tiny lump of a knot. Sometimes days pass after hearing a first transmission before Werner snares the next; they present a problem to solve, something to wrap his mind around: better, surely, than fighting in some — Anthony Doerr

Two days after his twelfth birthday, a fortnight before his father was jailed for debt, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory. There, in a rat-infested room by the docks, he sat for twelve hours a day, labelling boot polish and learning the pain of abandonment. While he never spoke publicly of this ordeal, it would always be with him: in his social conscience and burning ambition, in the hordes of innocent children who languished and died in his fiction.
Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth. And the outcome can't be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It's not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it. — Armistead Maupin

Luella had been Lou's favorite grandma. Some grandmas took their grandchildren to parks, or bought them books and dolls, or shared their special stories. Her grandma shared her recipes. She taught Lou how to check when a roast turkey was done, chop veggies without cutting off a finger, and bake a coconut cake grown men swooned over. A fog of comforting smells had perpetually blanketed her kitchen- an expression of her love so strong you could taste it. Lou caught the culinary bug during those early days and loved that she was named after her grandma, even if Lou believed she'd never make food quite as delicious. — Amy E. Reichert

Some time later, after Noah had discreetly disappeared, Declan's Volvo glided up, as quiet as the Pig was loud. Ronan said, "Move up, move up" to Blue until she scooted the passenger seat far enough for him to clamber behind it into the backseat. He hurriedly sprawled back in the seat, throwing one jean-covered leg over the top of Adam's and laying his head in a posture of thoughtless abandon. By the time Declan arrived at the driver's side window, Ronan looked as if he had been asleep for days.

"Lucky I was able to get away," Declan said. He peered into the car, eyes passing over Blue and snagging on Ronan in the backseat. His gaze followed his brother's leg to where it rested on top of Adam's, and his expression tightened.

"Thanks, D," Gansey said easily. With no effort, he pushed open the door, forcing Declan back without seeming to. He moved the conversation to the region of the front fender. It became a battle of genial smiles and deliberate hand gestures. — Maggie Stiefvater

I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon sum rather difficult topic, the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity-the greatest intensity of which I am capable-for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak (to my subconscious mind) that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. — Bertrand Russell

Knowledge is power, as some say. But on some days it is just as much pain and confusion as it is power; and any wise man worth his salt as a wise man at least understands this. One may be able to comprehend all the human perspectives in the universe, but this gives more to decipher regarding what is actually true; and even after discovering the truth, the challenge is in maintaining a patience for the infinite number of opinions that do not reflect that truth. Its consistency in man is challenge. A worldly knowledge ends at the former challenge of confusion, but the knowledge of Christ ends at the latter challenge of patience. — Criss Jami

A few days into the illness, they'll get a rash. With Marburg and Ebola the throat and conjunctivae get inflamed and there are small transparent lesions like tapioca granules in the soft palate. Then they start to bleed with a paradoxical combination of blood clots and hemorrhaging. The clots lodge in the brain, liver, spleen, and the hemorrhaging accelerates until the body cavities fill up with blood. Death comes some six to seven days after the first symptom, either from a massive stroke, or from shock. — Patrick Lynch