Bedside Quotes & Sayings

Mother made sure her little kids were subjected to a strict routine. We were given a timetable which covered our every waking moment, copies of which were posted by our bedside, in the sitting room and in the kitchen. Story hour meant that mother would read us novels and short stories by Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde and Edmondo de Amicis. Soon we graduated to Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. She read them to us in Chinese and I never realised until much later that the writers wrote them in different European languages. Comics were absolutely forbidden and so were Enid Blyton adventures and pop music ... Lee Cyn and I soon went to a primary school nearby ... After mother's rigorous timetable, school became fun and easy-going. — Ang Swee Chai

It is in vain that a man of sound mind and cool temper understands the condition of such a wretched being ... He can no more communicate his own wisdom to him than a healthy man can instil his strength into the invalid by whose bedside he is seated. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

And somewhere, in a black California morning, some hour before dawn, amid the corridors, the galleries, the faces of dream, fragments of conversation she half-recalled, waking to pale fog against the windows of the master bedroom, she prized something free and dragged it back through the wall of sleep. Rolling over, fumbling through a bedside drawer, finding a Porsche pen, a present from an assistant grip, she inscribed her treasure on the glossy back of an Italian fashion magazine: — William Gibson

I found a lacy red bra she left behind that fell by her bedside. Not to seem too Edward Cullen but I brought it to my nose. — Nicole Strycharz

These doctors, who had long experience with people in pain in addition to their traditional training and schooling, had discovered that nothing happens without communication, treatment based on evidence of outcome, and what used to be called a good bedside manner. — Marni Jackson

I'm frightened, but I'm not sure what I'm afraid of, which just exacerbates the fear. I don't even know whether there's anything to be frightened of. I look around the room. My phone is not on the bedside table. My handbag is not on the floor, it's not hanging over the back of the chair where I usually leave it. I must have had it, though, because I'm in the house, which means I have my keys. — Paula Hawkins

It's now the British Muse's fables That lie on maidens' bedside tables And haunt their dreams. They worship now The Vampire with his pensive brow, — Alexander Pushkin

I was almost a wife but lost the man. I was almost recognisable as a friend. And then I wasn't. The nights when I flicked off the bedside lamp and found myself in the heedless, lonely dark. The times I thought, with a horrified twist, that none of this was a gift. Suzanne got the redemption that followed a conviction ... I got the snuffed-out story of the bystander, a fugitive without a crime, half hoping and half terrified that no one was ever coming for me. — Emma Cline

Is it going to hurt?"
"You bet."
Sergeant Major had a lousy bedside manner. — Ilona Andrews

I held up a book, one Renfield had grabbed from my bedside table in his haste to pack for me. I'd found it in the bottom of my valise, one of the first things he threw in. Underwear and books - the fellow clearly had his priorities straight. — Lia Habel

How are you feeling?" Charlie asked, adding a small bottle of V-8 juice to the bedside table.
"Like I just sat through an entire Justin Bieber concert."
"Headache and nausea?
"And an overwhelming desire to die. — Tammy Blackwell

Gen. George S. Patton Jr. fears no one. But now he sleeps flat on his back in a hospital bed. His upper body is encased in plaster, the result of a car accident twelve days ago. Room 110 is a former utility closet, just fourteen feet by sixteen feet. There are no decorations, pictures on the walls, or elaborate furnishings - just the narrow bed, white walls, and a single high window. A chair has been brought in for Patton's wife, Beatrice, who endured a long, white-knuckle flight over the North Atlantic from the family home in Boston to be at his bedside. She sits there now, crochet hook moving silently back and forth, raising her eyes every few moments to see if her husband has awakened. — Bill O'Reilly

Captain Flane to the bridge!" A voice called over the intercom at his bedside. Flane stirred, pondering the degree of necessity that might motivate him to do more. — Christina Engela

Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist. — Charles Simic

Once a patient goes brain dead and relatives sign his organ donation consent form, he will get the best medical treatment of his life. A hospital code blue may be a call for doctors to rush to the bedside of a beating heart cadaver who needs his or her heart defibrillated. — Dick Teresi

The only sounds in the cave were the hopeless, abandoned sobbing, and plop-plop-plop of the drips.
Petra looked at us, then at the figure on the bed, then at us again, expectantly. When neither of us moved she appeared to decide that the initiative lay with her. She crossed to the bedside and knelt down concernedly beside it. Tentatively she put a hand on the dark hair.
'Don't,' she said. 'Please don't.'
There was a startled catch in the sobbing. A pause, then a brown arm reached out round Petra's shoulders. The sound became a little less desolate ... it no longer tore at one's heart: but it left it
bruised and aching.. — John Wyndham

Swann's father, an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts. Several times in the course of a year I would hear my grandfather tell at table the story, which never varied, of the behaviour of M. Swann the elder upon the death of his wife, by whose bedside he had watched day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him for a long time, hastened to join him at the Swanns' family property on the outskirts of Combray, and managed to entice him for a moment, weeping profusely, out of the death-chamber, so that he should not be present when the body was laid in its coffin. They took a turn or two in the park, where there was a little sunshine. Suddenly M. Swann seized my grandfather — Marcel Proust

She curled sideways into the milky light of the bedside lamp and began to read. — Sara Sheridan

My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE
GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading. — Anne Fadiman

She especially liked my bedside lamp, which had a five-sided porcelain shade. Unlit, the shade seemed like bumpy ivory. Lit, each panel came to life with the image of a bird: a blue jay, a cardinal, wrens, an oriole, and a dove. Kathleen turned it off and on again, several times. "How does it do that?"
"The panels are called lithophanes." I knew because I'd asked my father about the lamp, years ago. "The porcelain is carved and painted. You can see it if you look inside the shade."
"No," she said. "It's magic. I don't want to know how it's done. — Susan Hubbard

The point is, I can't tell you how to succeed. But I can tell you how not to: Give in to the shame of being rejected and put your manuscript - or painting, song, voice, dance moves, [insert passion here] - in the coffin that is your bedside drawer and close it for good. I guarantee you that it won't take you anywhere. Or you could do what this writer did: Give in to your obsession instead. — Kathryn Stockett

The book thief lay in bed that night, and the boy only came before she closed her eyes. He was one member of a cast, for Liesel was always visited in that room. Her papa stood and called her half a woman. Max was writing The Word Shaker in the corner. Rudy was naked by the door. Occasionally her mother stood on a bedside train platform. And far away, in the room that stretched like a bridge to a nameless town, her brother, Werner, played in the cemetery snow. — Markus Zusak

In the top drawer of my bedside table, there's a small box. It contains everything we need to make our night pleasurable. If you have to, leave everything else behind but bring that box."
She snorted as if in derision - but it was a weak snort. She walked toward the steps again.
"Amy."
She turned back to him. "What?"
"Did you notice I didn't ask for a nightshirt?"
She glanced at his lit in her hand and wondered why he told her that.
Then she knew why.
He had just told her he slept nude.
Every night in the cellar right beneath her bedchamber, his naked body remained at the ready to welcome her. Now that she knew it, she could never escape the image ... or the temptation. — Christina Dodd

I keep a bedside journal. I am very affected by dream information. They might be scary to other people, but they're mine, so they don't feel scary. I'd wake up in a cold sweat if I didn't dream these things ... — Clive Barker

This kingdom of God life is not a matter of waking up each morning with a list of chores or an agenda to be tended to, left on our bedside table by the Holy Spirit for us while we slept. We wake up already immersed in a large story of creation and covenant, of Israel and Jesus, the story of Jesus and the stories that Jesus told. We let ourselves be formed by these formative stories, and especially as we listen to the stories that Jesus tells, get a feel for the way he does it, the way he talks, the way he treats people, the Jesus way. — Eugene H. Peterson

They both went to opposite sides of the bed, snapped on their bedside lamps and pulled back the cover in a smooth, practiced, synchronized move that proved, depending on Madeline's mood, that they either had the perfect marriage or that they were stuck in a middle-class suburban rut and they needed to sell the house and go traveling around India. — Liane Moriarty

To "stand there" at the bedside of a patient who is faced with death from cancer is anathema for oncologists. — Nortin M. Hadler

Nick leans down and kisses my eyelids. "Loving you, Zara, is a full-time job. It's a great job, don't get me wrong. It's the best job in the universe. But it is not easy, because you tend to . . ."
"Get hurt?" Betty suggests. "Find trouble? Pass out? Break arms?"
"All of the above." Nick laughs.
My hand finds Nick's wrist and I grab onto its thickness. "You know, I'm the patient here. Where's the bedside manner? Where's the sympathy?"
"Zara, sympathy is just a good excuse to buy greeting cards and make sorry eyes and secretly gloat over how glad you are that you aren't the person whose crap is hanging out there for the world to see," Betty says. — Carrie Jones

You okay, sweetheart?" Daniel asked. He put the ice cream on the bedside table and sat on the edge of the bed, his eyes worried. I looked at him, then down at our little baby. "Never better," I said. — Kristan Higgins

He had a theory that bedroom Amharic and bedside Amharic were really the same thing: Please lie down. Take off your shirt. Open your mouth. Take a deep breath ... The language of love was the same as the language of medicine. — Abraham Verghese

Scott stood by the bedside, looking down at her. Then he spread his hands, revealing the fine tremors there.
'Look what you do to me. You make me weak.' Grace reached out a hand and touched his ridged stomach. 'You're the strongest man I know,' she said softly, feeling the shift and clench of muscle under her fingers as she stroked them down to his belt. She tugged at it. 'I want you. — Susan Napier

Buy books, then, that you have read with profit and pleasure and hope to read and reread. Buy books that you may underscore passages and write upon the margins, thus assuring yourself that the book is your own. Keep the books that mean the most to you close at hand, one or two, if possible, on a table at your bedside. Do not hide away your favorite books or keep them locked in enclosed shelves. Do not keep them under glass. — Burton Rascoe

Jakie, is it my birthday or am I dying? (Seeing all her children assembled at her bedside in her last illness.) — Nancy Astor The Viscountess Astor

My name is Herondale," the boy said cheerfully. "William Herondale, but everyone calls me Will. Is this really your room? Not very nice, is it?" He wandered toward the window, pausing to examine the stacks of books on her bedside table, and then the bed itself. He waved a hand at the ropes. "Do you often sleep tied to the bed? — Cassandra Clare

I started my career as a surgeon 25 years ago. But it turned out that I am not talented as a surgeon, so I decided to change my career. But I still feel that I am a doctor. So my goal, all my life, is to bring this stem-cell technology to the bedside. — Shinya Yamanaka

A thoughtful cup of tea brought to your bedside each morning means more to me than the huge bouquet of flowers bought once a year. — Penny Jordan

One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others'. My bedside is piled with books, but it's duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs. — Mary Roach

When my grandmother - may she attain the Kingdom of Heaven - was dying, my mother, as was then the custom, took me to her bedside and, as I kissed her right hand, my dear grandmother placed her dying left hand on my head and said in a whisper, yet very distinctly: "Eldest of my grandsons! Listen and always remember my strict injunction to you: In life never do as others do." Having said this, she gazed at the bridge of my nose and, evidently noticing my perplexity and my obscure understanding of what she had said, added somewhat angrily and imperiously: "Either do nothing - just go to school - or do something nobody else does Whereupon she immediately, without hesitation and with a perceptible impulse of disdain for all around her, and with commendable self-cognizance, gave up her soul directly into the hands of His Faithfulness, the Archangel Gabriel. — G.I. Gurdjieff

A book would therefore have a twofold benefit. First, it would rid me of my demons and perhaps save some innocent conversationalist from my clutches. Second, unlike me, a book could be left snugly on the bedside table or beside the lavatory: opened at will and closed at will. — Mark Forsyth

I felt that no boy should have to depend either for his leg or his life upon the ability of his parents to raise enough money to bring a first-class surgeon to his bedside, — Tommy Douglas

I'm thinking about Carol and Grace, my two best friends. At the same time I can't remember exactly what they look like. Did I really sit on the floor of Grace's bedroom, on her braided bedside rug, cutting out pictures of frying pans and washing machines from the Eaton's Catalogue and pasting them into a scrapbook? Already it seems implausible, and yet I know I did it. — Margaret Atwood

With four-to-one odds against us, our ability to leave the encounter without serious damage becomes seriously impaired." "Spock," McCoy said gently, "your bedside manner is flawless. You mean, we're all going to be blown to hell." Spock hesitated, then nodded. — Diane Duane

Sean swung around and crossed the hall in one long stride. He pushed open the door and they moved into her bedroom, lit only by the warm glow of her bedside lamp. The next thing Evie knew, she was flat on her back on her king-size bed with a fierce-eyed warrior braced over her. "Your're not wearing any underwear, are you?"

She giggled. "There's only one way to find out for sure."

"Don't have to ask me twice." He pushed the hem of her dress up her thighs. Instant heat rushed to her sex. It was those damn hands of his, their size and power and gentleness. They made her melt just by landing on her body. — Jennifer Bernard

At night, with only the bedside lamp on, I would pretend to sleep and listened to Dad's muffled crying in the semi-darkness, wishing that I could cry like him, that I could bring Stevan back from the dead by the strength of my tears. But they were regular tears carving the same slicing-hot trails down my cheeks, and in the end, I could not summon a distinct kind of grief for Stevan. Just the same grief that has gripped mankind for centuries, which time would inevitably ebb into a notch in one's skin or a small limp in the way one walks or a bottled memory that would only resurface some nights. And soon, you'd struggle to remember how that person talked or how that person used to occupy a customized space in your life. And you don't want to forget, but you don't want to remember either, and there seemed to be no place where you could just exist. — V.J. Campilan

that the servant who stood by her bedside — Frances Hodgson Burnett

I wished there was some kind of switch on my brain. That I could turn it off in the same way that I could turn off the television. Just click it off and immediately empty my mind of all these images and worrying thoughts. And simply leave a blank screen. Or if I could just remove my head and put it on the bedside table and forget about it until morning. And then attach it again when I needed it. — Marian Keyes

At a quarter to twelve on that Friday, Patty Jefferson died. In the final moments, Jefferson's sister Martha Carr had to help the grieving husband from his wife's bedside.13 He was, his daughter recalled, "in a state of insensibility" when Mrs. Carr "with great difficulty, got him into the library, where he fainted" - and not for a brief moment. Jefferson "remained so long insensible that they feared he would never revive." When he did come to, he was incoherent with grief, and perhaps surrendered to rage. There is a hint that he lost all control in the calamity of Patty's death. According to his daughter Patsy, "The scene that followed I did not witness" - presumably "the scene" unfolded in the library when he revived - "but the violence of his emotion, when, almost by stealth, I entered his room by night, to this day I dare not describe to myself."14 (Patsy was writing half a century later.) A — Jon Meacham

Such frankness, even over good tidings, was a further offense to Mr. Fremlin. He felt that it was casual and indecent. Like most countrymen, he had a great respect for traditional mysteries. A little skill decently wrapped up impressed him far more than twice the amount flung nakedly at his feet. Old Dr. Milsom had satisfied his sense of propriety. Never, never would he have told a patient whether or not she was going to live or die; the temperature was his secret, even the name of the complain transpired only in dark hints. Standing by the bedside he would shake his head and purse his lips and consult his gold turnip-watch, so that you felt you were getting the benefit of a rare and esoteric wisdom. — Dennis Parry

People's live are expressed in little details ... The soap in the bathroom, the flowers in the garden, the books on the bedside table are all strong symbols of a life in progress. You look at these details and a world unfolds - here are their books, the paintings they cherish, the music that soothes their souls. — Charlotte Moss

Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was, you could have asked the local florist - because every day Dad gave Mom a rose, which he put on her bedside table. That's how she found out what happened on the day my father died - she went looking for him because that morning, there was no rose. — Mitt Romney

I have seen my father concede to utter defeat in the hospital room. I've heard him choke on sobs and whisper angry things to the god of the sky when he thought I was asleep at Lex's bedside. I know that those uniforms are worn by men - only men. — Lauren DeStefano

Yeah, well there's your first problem. You don't get it. You can't even see what you did. You're going to sit here today and you're going to convince yourself that you were right and I was unreasonable and you won't even think about what you just tried to make me into. But hey ... It's not my problem, now. You think what you want. I'm gone."
He sighed and reached for my suitcase. "Will you at least let me help you down the stairs?"
"Fuck off." I'd rather break my neck than let him give me a second of assistance.
"Topher, come on!" Now he sounded annoyed and seriously, fuck him, he didn't get to be pissy over this. I turned around and gave him a withering look.
"Be sure you clear the lube out of the bedside table before you bang your wife in that room. It's a dead giveaway. — Amelia C. Gormley

Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom. Let not your conceptions of disease come from words heard in the lecture room or read from the book. See, and then reason and compare and control. But see first. — William Osler

I'm not lonely, and I think that has a lot to do with what's on my bedside table rather than what's in my bed. — Michelle Williams

The air of caricature never fails to show itself in the products of reason applied relentlessly and without correction. The observation of clinical facts would seem to be a pursuit of the physician as harmless as it is indispensable. [But] it seemed irresistibly rational to certain minds that diseases should be as fully classifiable as are beetles and butterflies. This doctrine ... bore perhaps its richest fruit in the hands of Boissier de Sauvauges. In his Nosologia Methodica published in 1768 ... this Linnaeus of the bedside grouped diseases into ten classes, 295 genera, and 2400 species. — Wilfred Trotter

His room was still and very quiet, insulated by sound building and oak boards from the jabber of the dissenting voices below. He unlatched the window in the seaward wall and forced it open with both hands against the blast of the gale. the wind rushed into the room swirling the bed cover into folds, sweeping the papers from his desk and rustling the pages of his bedside Jane Austen like a giant hand. It took his breath away so that he leaned gasping against the window ledge, welcoming the sting of spray on his face and tasting the salt drying on his lips. When he closed the window the silence seemed absolute. The thundering surf receded and faded like the far-away moaning on another shore. — P.D. James

A good conscience will be found a pleasant visitor at our bedside in a dying hour. — J.C. Ryle

I sighed. "Show me the damn ring, Edward."
He shook his head. "No."
I studied his expression for a long minute.
"Please?" I asked quietly, experimenting with my newly discovered weapon. I touched his face lightly with the tips of my fingers. "Please can I see it?"
His eyes narrowed. "You are the most dangerous creature I have ever met," he muttered. But he got up and moved with unconscious grace to kneel next to the small bedside table. — Stephenie Meyer

Here," Trey says, fumbling for his cell phone on the bedside table. "You should call me.
Ben turns and looks at him, a small smile still playing around his lips. "Oh, should I? What's your number?"
Trey tells him, and Ben enters it into is phone, and then he takes Trey's and enters his number. "Okay," Ben says a little cautiously, "well, we'd love to have you come for a meeting. Are you seriously considering U of C? Even after what happened?"
"Oh yeah. I totally am. "What's your name again?"
Ben laughs and tells him.
I frown. Trey knows U of C is a private school. Mucho big bucks. But hey ... there's always the power of morphine to make you forget about the minor details of your life, like living above a restaurant that struggles monthly to pay bills, and considering returning to the place where some lunatic outsider came in and fucking shot you because you're gay. — Lisa McMann

There are certain books that I mean to read and keep stacked by my bedside. I even take them on trips. Some of my books should be awarded their own frequent-flier miles, they've traveled so much. I take these volumes on flight after flight with the best of intentions and then end up reading anything and everything else. (Sky Mall! Golf Digest!) — Will Schwalbe

Where are they now? she thought. Her iPod, her iPhone, her iPad, the I-ness of her life? Her mind stretched around in its memories, searching for her things: She saw her phone on the hotel bedside table in Paris; her iPad in her Louis Vuitton urban satchel; her iPod slipping from her pocket in the restaurant, the night before she ran away. — Jaclyn Moriarty

I usually have about four books on the go - a bedside book, a lavatory book, a downstairs book, and the book in my study that I read sneakily while I should be writing. Short stories for the lavatory, obviously. — Mal Peet

Do ghosts have to be forgiven? All I remember of the funeral is, 'Your husband was a brilliant man.' Was that all the comfort that I had to draw on? I wanted to announce, 'Yes he was a brilliant man and now like all the great minds he is dead.' Sometimes I cry myself to sleep, sniffling, stifling my sobs in my pillows. Sometimes I fall asleep the minute my head hits the pillow and find my arms reaching across the other side of the bed for Kenny so I can whisper sweet nothings in his ear as he falls asleep.

I reached out for the bottle of sleeping tablets on my bedside table and swallowed them one by one. — Abigail George

Every morning when I wake up I forget for a fraction of a second that you are gone and I reach for you. All I ever find is the cold side of the bed. My eyes settle on the picture of us in Paris, on the bedside table, and I am overjoyed that even though the time was brief I loved you and you loved me. — Anonymous

This is all very fine, but it won't do-Anatomy-botany-Nonsense! Sir, I know an old woman in Covent Garden, who understands botany better, and as for anatomy, my butcher can dissect a joint full as well; no, young man, all that is stuff; you must go to the bedside, it is there alone you can learn disease!
Comment to Hans Sloane on Robert Boyle's letter of introduction describing Sloane as a 'ripe scholar, a good botanist, a skilful anatomist'. — Thomas Sydenham

Thought is pleasing. Her room is small, neat, and girlish: all whites, creams, and baby blues, and bathed in the soft glow of her bedside lamp. It's also a little empty, but I spy — E.L. James

Tomas turned the key and switched on the ceiling light. Teraza saw two beds pushed together, one of them flanked by a bedside table and a lamp. Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room. The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below. — Milan Kundera

A famous cigarette billboard pictures a curly-headed, bronze-faced, muscular macho with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth. The sign reads 'Where a man belongs.' That is a lie. Where a man belongs is at the bedside of his children, leading in devotion and prayer. Where a man belongs is leading his family to the house of God. Where a man belongs is up early and alone with God seeking vision and direction for the family. — John Piper

One of the most marvelous things I experienced was that you hold another one's hand in your hand, you feel the pulse, then it becomes slower and slower, then that's it. It's something enormous. Then you still hold that hand, then the nurse comes in, bringing with her the number for the corpse. The nurse wheels her out once more and says: "Come back later." Then you are immediately confronted with life again. You calmly get up and put things in order; in the meantime the nurse comes back and attaches the number to the corpse, you empty the bedside cabinet, the nurse says: "Don't forget the yogurt, you have to take it too." Outside you hear the crows -- it's like a theatrical play.

Then the bad conscience comes. A dead person leaves you with an immense guilt. — Thomas Bernhard

She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she'd remember the brutal fact that had caused it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

He had no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and speculative thinking, but by the bedside of patients the direct external calls on his judgment and sympathies brought the added impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It was not simply that beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly - it was a perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of thought, and on the consideration of another's need and trial. Many of us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we have ever known has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact, directed by deeply-informed perception, has come to us in our need with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers. Some of that twice-blessed mercy was always with Lydgate in his work at the Hospital or in private houses, serving better than any opiate to quiet and sustain him under anxieties and his sense of mental degeneracy. — George Eliot

She suspected if they looked in Gamache's bedside table, they'd find all sorts of lost souls he put there for safekeeping. And maybe a baguette. — Louise Penny

Tremble had a secret. Underneath his dreary exterior, he was quite interesting. When his penchant for investigating the area's past was indulged, a light shown in his eyes and he became almost passionate, which is why his wife kept a stack of local history books on her bedside table. — Christopher Fowler

Not a chance,' said the doctor. If he had a bedside manner he evidently saved it for actual bedsides. — Catriona McPherson

We talked through Gillie's life from start to finish, including all her accomplishments and major life events. The woman fell asleep with a dreamy half smile still on her lips.
I remained by her bedside. Cog would be amused by my efforts to comfort an upper. No. Not amused. Proud. I liked Ella. She was a good sort, much nicer than Trella, and I hoped she managed to survive the next thirty hours. — Maria V. Snyder

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely. — Lee Siegel

Cam leaned over the bedside, clasping Jenner's hands in his just as Evie had done. "Father of my heart," the young Gypsy said softly, "be at peace with every soul you leave behind. And know that God will open your way in the new life. — Lisa Kleypas

I stretched out my hand towards the little bookshelf where I kept cookery and devotional books, the most comfortable bedside reading. — Barbara Pym

For the longest time I was so sick I didn't have the strength or inclination to read, but looking at my books stacked up on the bedside table was comforting, like having old friends sitting in the room with me, friends who didn't require anything of me, friends who brought me great pleasure just with their presence, waiting until I could engage with them again.... bibliophiles know the inanimate pleasure of the friendship with books. — Lindsey O'Connor

When I saw "Ulysses" on Georgie's bedside table and Tom Finch's name written on it in a scrawl so like my old man's, I felt that I wanted to read it as a preparation for what's about to happen to us all. I understand where the brawny part of my father and I come from - Bill. I'm not saying bill's not smart, but my old man is a pretty intelligent guy and that kind of intellect came from tome Finch. I want to turn the pages he turned. But honestly I'm actually finding it hard. I think that the whole world has lied and nobody has read the book completely. It's a conspiracy up there with Roswell. — Melina Marchetta

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient whose care I am taking over is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important. — Abraham Verghese

Nicholas Was ... older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die. The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories. Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves' invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time. He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher. Ho. Ho. Ho. — Neil Gaiman

On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open the book to know how the story began. "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show," he recited from memory. — John Irving

You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere. — William S. Burroughs

She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of the Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer. — Penelope Lively

He has been named as the heir apparent of the great Argentine hero, Diego Maradona, by journalists, players, and Maradona himself, alike. I'd personally put him in a drawer of my bedside table. — Franz Beckenbauer

You try spending six months sitting at somebody's bedside, waiting for them to die and then tell me that the happy-ending love story isn't one of God's good gifts. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Waking up each morning to a hysterical alarm clock on the bedside table. — Paulo Coelho

And books all over the floor, some stocked in piles, some worn-looking, some brand-new, some splayed upside down, some sliding off the pink bedside table next to the lamp with the orange fabric shade. — Rebecca Stead

Suttree surfaced from these fevered deeps to hear a maudlin voice chant latin by his bedside, what medieval ghost come to usurp his fallen corporeality. An oiled thumball redolent of lime and sage pondered his shuttered lids.
Miserere mei, Deus ...
His ears anointed, his lips ... omnis maligna discordia ... Bechrismed with scented oils he lay boneless in a cold euphoria. Japheth when you left your father's house the birds had flown. You were not prepared for such weathers. You'd spoke too lightly of the winter in your father's heart. We saw you in the streets. Sad. — Cormac McCarthy

I usually plan to read a book for a half-hour before bed, but then I end up staying awake until 3 A.M. to finish it. Fortunately, my dog doesn't mind when I keep the bedside lamp on. — Amanda Hocking

In bed that night, in the darkness, with the illuminated dial of her alarm clock glowing from the bedside table, she asked herself whether one could force oneself to like somebody, or whether one could merely create conditions for affection to come into existence and hope that it did, spontaneously. Open then our hearts - these words came into her mind, dredged from somewhere in her memory, from some unknown context. If one opened one's heart, then friendship, and love, too, might alight and make their presence known. It was the act of opening that came first; that was the important thing, the first thing. But who was it who said, Open then our hearts? Where did that come from? — Alexander McCall Smith

A rush of sensation pulsed through her, lingering long after his touch. The towel quickly fell free. He caught it before it slipped to the ground and slung it over his shoulder. "Consider this your first time," he said, his tone low and sultry.
Good Lord ... Paige could hardly blink. If this was any indication of the doc's bedside manner, she could only hope for long-term, intensive treatment. — Tracy March

I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since. — Stephen Fry

The soap in the bathroom, the flowers in the garden, the book on the bedside table are all strong symbols of a life in progress. You look at these details and a world unfolds. — Charlotte Moss

Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile. — Vladimir Nabokov

I thought about life, about my life, the embarrassments, the little coincidences, the shadows of alarm clocks on bedside tables. I thought about my small victories and everything I'd seen destroyed, I'd swum through mink coats on my parents' bed while they hosted downstairs, I'd lost the only person I could have spent my only life with, I'd left behind a thousand tons of marble, I could have released sculptures, I could have released myself from the marble of myself. I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless. None of my pets know their own names, what kind of person am I? — Jonathan Safran Foer

I like having surprises in the morning for each other on the bedside table, so when you wake up you have something immediately. Just like a little teaser. Then I think it's nice to stay in bed all morning. It's simple. — Evan Rachel Wood

This woman is Pocahontas. She is Athena and Hera. Lying in this messy, unmade bed, eyes closed, this is Juliet Capulet. Blanche DuBois. Scarlett O'Hara. With ministrations of lipstick and eyeliner I give birth to Ophelia. To Marie Antoinette. Over the next trip of the larger hand around the face of the bedside clock, I give form to Lucrezia Borgia. Taking shape at my fingertips, my touches of foundation and blush, here is Jocasta. Lying here, Lady Windermere. Opening her eyes, Cleopatra. Given flesh, a smile, swinging her sculpted legs off one side of the bed, this is Helen of Troy. Yawning and stretching, here is every beautiful woman across history. — Chuck Palahniuk