Quotes & Sayings About Biding Your Time

Biding one's time is a very different thing from patience. — E.L. Konigsburg

I realize the blackness of sleep is circling my head. It's been there a while, biding its time and growing closer with each revolution. I give up on rage, which at this point has become a formality, and make a mental note to get angry in the morning. — Sara Gruen

Don't holler - smile and bide your time.' We've survived a passel of things that way, smiling and biding our time, and we've gotten to be experts at surviving. We had to be. — Margaret Mitchell

She's not my nurse but she comes up to Gran and Gramps just the same. "Don't you doubt for a second that she can hear you," she tells them. "She's aware if everything that's going on." She stands there with her hands on her hip. I can almost picture her snapping gum. Gran and Gramps stare at her, lapping up what she's telling them. "You might think the doctors or nurses or all this equipment is running the show," she says, gesturing to the wall of medical equipment. "Nuh-uh. She's running the show. Maybe she's just biding her time. So you talk to her. You tell her to take all the time she needs, but to come on back. You're waiting for her. — Gayle Forman

So I'm biding my time, like a surfer waiting for a wave. I'm pretty good at surfing, as it happens, and I know the wave will come. When the moment is right, I'll get Demeter's attention. She'll look at my stuff, everything will click, and I'll start riding my life. Not paddling, paddling, paddling, like I am right now. — Sophie Kinsella

The days glided by. The fervid Summer slid away round the shoulder of the world, and made room for her dignified matron sister; my lady Autumn swept her frayed and discoloured train out of the great hall-door of the world, and old brother Winter, who so assiduously waits upon the house, and cleans its innermost recesses, was creeping around it, biding his time, but eager to get to his work. — George MacDonald

And if we folks have a motto, it's this: 'Don't holler - smile and bide your time.' We've survived a passel of things that way, smiling and biding our time, and we've gotten to be experts at surviving. — Margaret Mitchell

His impression was that he had been imprisoned in a shelter deep down in the underworld of his personality, listening and biding his time while insanity rushed like spring flood through the upper layer of his soul, roaring and crashing, leaving terrible destruction in its wake, a deserted, ravaged country. No, he hadn't been crazy, but something inside him had been crazy. — Christer Kihlman

You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn't much time left over for emotion recollected in tranquillity. — Jay McInerney

The problem with playing hide-and-seek with your sister is that sometimes she gets bored and stops looking for you.And there you are - under the couch, in the closet, wedged behind the lilac tree - and you don't want to give up,because maybe she's just biding her time. But maybe she's wandered off. ... Maybe she's downstairs watching TV and eating the rest of the Pringles.You wait. You wait until you forget that you're waiting, until you forget that there's anything to you beyond stillnessand quiet; an ant crawls over your knee, and you don't flinch. And it doesn't matter now whether she's coming for you - the hiding is enough. (You win when no one finds you, even if they're not looking.)When you break from behind the tree, it's because you want to. It's the first breath after a long dive. Branches snapunder your feet, and the world is hotter and brighter.
Ready or not, here I come. Here I come, ready or not. — Rainbow Rowell

I'm biding my time until my real life kicks in."
"How will you know when that happens?"
"It will be when I no longer have a list of things I've never done. — G.J. Walker-Smith

In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time. — W. Somerset Maugham

Courage is not always big and bright and loud; sometimes it's as silent and small as true words, a smile when you'd rather weep, or getting up every day and living with quiet dignity while all around you life rages. You cannot truly love, live or exist without courage. Without it you are simply biding time until you die. — Wendy Mills

She's running the show. Maybe she's just biding her time. So you talk to her. You tell her to take all the time she needs, but to come back. — Gayle Forman

Has this version of me been lurking there all along, somewhere deep below the surface, biding its time, waiting for its chance to make an appearance? — Cat Clarke

(If I were a member of the class that rules, I would post men in all the neighborhoods of the nation, not to spy upon or club rebellious workers, not to break strikes or disrupt unions; but to ferret out those who no longer respond to the system in which they live. I would make it known that the real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth through force, or from those who try to defend their property through violence, for both of these groups, by their affirmative acts, support the values of the system in which they live. The millions that I would fear are those who do not dream of the prizes that the nation holds forth, for it is in them, though they may not know it, that a revolution has taken place and is biding its time to translate itself into a new and strange way of life.) — Richard Wright

People are going to think and take things how they're going to take it, and I have no control over that, so it's kind of like biding time until you get your feedback. So, it's like, once the public can consume what you're putting out there, then you know. Then you know hit, miss, in between. — Phil Anselmo

You think it's impossible to be a passive fighter? Well, sometimes fighting just means existing. Existing, not going away, and quietly biding your time. — Sophie Hardach

William's eyes glowed like two amber coals. She met his gaze and flinched. No emotion reflected in the amber, only intelligence, cruel in a way the eyes of a hunting Mire cat were cruel. She saw no worry, no softness, no thoughts at all, only waiting. He seemed barely human now, not a man but some feral thing, knitted of darkness and biding his time for an opportunity to pounce. — Ilona Andrews

God know my shame as I push my mule to exhaustion, even after the moon and Venus have risen to preside over the owls and mice, because I am not going back to my family - my wife, my children - because my wife's silence is not the forbearance of decent, stern people who fear You; it is the quiet of outrage, of bitterness. It is the quiet of biding time. God forgive me. I am leaving. — Paul Harding

When blocked or defeated in an enterprise I had much at heart, I always turned immediately to another field of work where progress looked possible, biding my time for a chance to resume the obstructed road. — Charles William Eliot

I don't think I've ever heard you laugh. Ever. You face life like it's a warrior come to chop your head off, and you're just biding your time fretting until it does. Haven't you ever heard of the power of laughter? — Noelle Crawford

Now, as far as I knew, he (Luke) was still sailing around on his demon-infested cruise ship while the chopped-up Lord Kronos re-formed, bit by bit, in a golden sarcophagus, biding his time until he had enough power to challenge the Olympian gods. In demigod-speak, we call this a "problem."
- Percy, 'The Battle of the Labyrinth — Rick Riordan

I cling to my anger with every ounce of humanity left in my ruined body, but it's no use. It slips away, like a wave from shore. I am pondering this sad fact when I realize the blackness of sleep is circling my head. It's been there awhile, biding its time and growing closer with each revolution. I give up on rage, which at this point has become a formality, and make a mental note to get angry again in the morning. Then I let myself drift, because there's really no fighting it. — Sara Gruen

At home there tarries like a lurking snake,
Biding its time, a wrath unreconciled,
A wily watcher, passionate to slake,
In blood, resentment for a murdered child. — Aeschylus

The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time. — Arthur C. Clarke

Slowly, my feelings started to shrivel up. The few that managed to survive the constant beatings staggered around like wounded baby deer, just biding their time until they could die and join all the other carcasses strewn across the wasteland of my soul. — Allie Brosh

I never did theater. I was a theater major at USC my first year because I didn't get into the film school. I was biding my time, hoping to be accepted to film school, and I ended up transferring to UCLA my sophomore year. — Darren Star

I'm quickly approaching the moment of discovery: of myself by myself, which was something I knew all along and yet didn't know; and the discovery by poor half-blind Dr. Philobosian of what he'd failed to notice at my birth and continued to miss during every annual physical thereafter; and the discovery by my parents of what kind of child they'd given birth to (answer: the same child, only different); and finally, the discovery of the mutated gene that had lain buried in our bloodline for two hundred and fifty years, biding its time, waiting for Ataturk to attack, for Hajienestis to turn into glass, for a clarinet to play seductively out a back window, until, comint together with its recessive twin, it started the chain of events that led to me, here, writing in Berlin. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Many mammals and birds have systems for strong self-control, and it is not difficult to see why such systems were advantageous and were selected for. Biding your time, deferring gratification, staying still, foregoing sex for safety, and so forth, is essential in getting food, in surviving, and in successful reproduction. — Patricia Churchland

Now that she was asked to speak at roundtables and panels, on public radio and community radio, always identified simply as The Blogger, she felt subsumed by her blog and had become her blog. There were times, lying awake at night, when her growing discomforts crawled out from the crevices, and the many readers became, in her mind, a judgmental angry mob waiting for her, biding their time until they could attack her, unmask her. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

They soared with ease, basking in electromagnetic rays from the star Sol, biding their time, grouping, preparing. The planet beneath them was almost perfectly oblivious of their presence, which was just how they wanted it for the moment. — Douglas Adams

You think I don't know pain?" Puck shook his head at me. "Or loss? I've been around a lot longer than you, prince! I know what love is, and I've lost
my fair share, too. Just because we have a different way of handling it, doesn't mean I don't have scars of my own."
"Name one," I scoffed. "Give me one instance where you haven't - "
"Meghan Chase!" Puck roared, startling me into silence. I blinked, and he sneered at me. "Yeah, your highness. I know what loss is. I've loved that
girl since before she knew me. But I waited. I waited because I didn't want to lie about who I was. I wanted her to know the truth before anything else.
So I waited, and I did my job. For years, I protected her, biding my time, until the day she went into the Nevernever after her brother. And then you
came along. And I saw how she looked at you. And for the first time, I wanted to kill you as much as you wanted to kill me. — Julie Kagawa

Biding time is easy -- and gets you nowhere. — Johanna Lindsey

Celebrity is just obscurity biding its time. — Carrie Fisher

I am merely biding my time. (Stryder)
For what? (Rowena)
For the moment when I am out of this cell and am able to wreak havoc on the one who put me here. I'm going to pull out his innards through his nostrils and dance around his entrails. (Stryder) — Kinley MacGregor