Dawdling Quotes & Sayings

The human bones are but vain lines dawdling, the whole universe a blank mold of stars. — Jack Kerouac

In dawdling through the greenhouse, where the loss of her favorite plants, unwarily exposed, and nipped by the lingering frost, raised the laughter of Charlotte,-and in visiting her poultry-yard, where in the disappointed hopes of her dairymaid, by hens forsaking their nests, or being stolen by a fox, or in the rapid decease of a promising young brood, she found fresh sources of merriment. — Jane Austen

To let blessed babies go dangling and dawdling without names, for months and months, was enough to ruin them for life. — Kate Douglas Wiggin

While Terrorism is a war that starts developing within the mind,
Religion is a war that antagonizes our conscience, but
Love is alway a war within the heart.....
Lori F.5/2002 Share The Peace! — Lori Foroozandeh

Verily this is the very crown of my misfortunes, that men's opinions for the most part look not to real merit, but to the event; and only recognise foresight where Fortune has crowned the issue with her approval. — Boethius

Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered. — Ralph Vaughan Williams

She took his mouth, gave it a nice little bite as she ground against him. "There you are," she murmured.
"Well, you've left me no choice."
"A cock's always ready to crow."
He laughed, wrapped his arms around her. "Crowing's not what mine's ready for."
"Show me." She went to work on his trousers.
Amused, aroused, he watched her. "In a bit of a hurry, are we?"
"I've got to use you and get back to work, so no dawdling. — J.D. Robb

She settled into a crouch, wings pinned tightly to her back. "Come on then, angel boy." She kept her eyes on the muscles in his shoulders, saw the instant one tensed. A split second later, they were moving in a wicked, dangerous dance of steel and bodies. She'd never really had a chance to spar with Raphael like this, and damn if it wasn't the most fun she'd ever had. — Nalini Singh

For it was the one that I would have chosen above all others, convinced as I was, with a botanist's satisfaction, that it was not possible to find gathered together rarer specimens than these young flowers that at this moment before my eyes were breaking the line of the sea with their slender heads, like a bower of Pennsylvania roses adorned a Cliffside garden, between whose blooms is contained the whole tract of ocean crossed by some steamer, so slow in gliding along the blue, horizontal line that stretches from one stem to the next that an idle butterfly, dawdling in the cup of a flower which the ship's hull has long since passed, can wait, before flying off in time to arrive before it, until nothing by the tiniest chink of blue still separates the prow from the first petal of the flower towards which it is steering. — Marcel Proust

How's the blood-stream, my dear, invaluable little woman? How's the blood-stream?" ...
"It's quite comfortable, sir ... I think, sir, thank you." ...
"Aha!" ... "a comfortable stream, is it? Aha! v-e-r-y good. V-e-r-y good. Dawdling 'twixt hill and hill, no doubt. Meandering through groves of bone, threading the tissues and giving what sustenance it can to your dear old body ... I am so glad. But in yourself - right deep down in yourself - how do you feel? Carnally speaking, are you at peace - from the dear grey hairs of your head to the patter of your little feet - are you at peace?"
"What does he mean, dear?" said poor Mrs. Slagg, clutching Fuschia's arm ...
"He wants to know if you feel well or not. — Mervyn Peake

There are other books in a man's library besides Ovid, and after dawdling ever so long at a woman's knee, one day he gets up and is free. We have all been there; we have all had the fever
the strongest and the smallest, from Samson, Hercules, Rinaldo, downward: but it burns out, and you get well. — William Makepeace Thackeray

On the whole, it seems to me that probably the American press is doing a better job of this mediation, so to speak, between the people and the administration than the press of any other country. — Walter Millis

I will work out exactly how - with my no money, no money at all, until I actually receive my first, dawdling pay-cheque - I will get to Birmingham later. Perhaps Birmingham will, in the next week, move closer to Wolverhampton, and I can simply walk there! — Caitlin Moran

Reluctantly, I headed for the stairs. I wasn't dawdling. Not exactly. Just giving Father a bit of time to calm down. — R.L. LaFevers

Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people- there are many of them- who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling around them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour- flirting- and if carried far enough, it is punishable by law. But no law- not public opinion, even- punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of these? — E. M. Forster

Today we say that the law of relativity is supposed to be true at all energies, but someday somebody may come along and say how stupid we were. — Richard P. Feynman

My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding. — Amy Bloom

We ought, therefore, to lessen the price of food to our manufacturers, and place them more on a level with the manufacturers who have cheaper food, and also much lighter taxation. — Joseph Hume

The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor. — Karl Marx

I sense that I am dawdling in this narrative, having already reached my eighth roll of Hieratica, and need to speed it up a little, else either I shall die on the job, or you will be worn out reading. — Robert Harris

I had a career that was very short, but it had a lot of thrills. — Gale Sayers

And you, whiner, who wastes your time
Dawdling over the remorseless earth,
What evil, what unspeakable crime
Have you made your life worth? — W. D. Snodgrass

I had lost all perspective; I was wandering in a desperate purgatory (with a gray man in a gray boat in a gray river: an apathetic Charon dawdling upon a passionless phlegmatic River Styx ... and a petulant Christ child bawling on the train ... ). — Sylvia Plath

A sluggish, dawdling, and dilatory man may have spasms of activity, but he never acts continuously and consecutively with energetic quickness. — George Stillman Hillard

The pleasure of sport was so often the chance to indulge the cessation of time itself
the pitcher dawdling on the mound, the skier poised at the top of a mountain trail, the basketball player with the rough skin of the ball against his palm preparing for a foul shot, the tennis player at set point over his opponent
all of them savoring a moment before committing themselves to action. — George Plimpton

It was the biggest inflation and the most sustained inflation that the United States had ever had. — Paul A. Volcker

I don't get mad too much. — Tom Cochrane

But I should like to take these things on full gallop, instead of dawdling along gaping at them. I get fearfully tired, and a very little Abbey goes a long way with me. — Susan Hale

If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing. — Pearl S. Buck

My depth of purse is not so great
Nor yet my bibliophilic greed,
That merely buying doth elate:
The books I buy I like to read:
Still e'en when dawdling in a mead,
Beneath a cloudless summer sky,
By bank of Thames, or Tyne, or Tweed,
The books I read - I like to buy. — A. Edward Newton

The imagination needs moodling,
long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. — Brenda Ueland

It'll leave you feeling hollow and helpless, and there is where you'll stay. Ain't it funny child, love sometimes leaves you as dead as yesterday. — Zakk Wylde

I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.
It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and
coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself. — Sylvia Plath

Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. I am a very happy man. Thank you. - Dr. Hoenikker's Nobel Prize acceptance speech (in its entirety); chapter 5 — Kurt Vonnegut

I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. I am a very happy man. Thank you. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It is claimed that the United States gets the cleanest and purest tea in the market, and certainly it is too good to warrant the nervous apprehension which strains and dilutes it into nothingness. The English do not strain their tea in the fervid fashion we do. They like to see a few leaves dawdling about the cup. They like to know what they are drinking. — Agnes Repplier

Damn if that man didn't look as good as a double bacon cheeseburger, after a week spent camping with my vegan friends. Fuck my life. — Madeline Sheehan

Why, they are so sure of themselves that they do not even hurry. They move slowly, phlegmatically; they speak of necessary centuries. They swallow worlds at leisure; creep through systems with dawdling complacence. — Isaac Asimov