Quotes & Sayings About Down Days

Technology, while providing us many advantages, encourages us to race through our days so that we no longer know what we'd do if we were to slow down. Labor-saving devices seem not only to have failed to enhance the quality of our lives and free up more time, but get between us and the immediate, sensory pleasures of life and increase the pressures on us to do more. Many of us feel cut off from life's blessings, from our neighbors, from the wonders of nature, and from our sense of our own significance in the scheme of things. Modern life leaves us spiritually starved — Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett

Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren't necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in LA with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nuhp in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing 120 on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at 55; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nuhp cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It's all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed.
Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have. — George Alec Effinger

As her brother turned to walk away, she asked with mild exasperation, "Where are you going? Leo, you can't leave when there's so much to be done."
He stopped and glanced back at her with a raised brow. "You've been pouring unsweetened tea down my throat for days. If you have no objection, I'd like to go out for a piss."
She narrowed her eyes. "I can think of at least a dozen polite euphemisms you could have used."
Leo continued on his way. "I don't use euphemisms."
"Or politeness," she said, making him chuckle. — Lisa Kleypas

Jesus Christ was as perfect as a human bein' can be, yet he got mad and fought and wept and had days of feelin' like he couldn't go on another step. Like when the lepers and the sick folks almost trampled him down, all of 'em beggin' for miracles and doggin' him till he was about miracled out. What I'm sayin', Mr. Mackenson, is that even Jesus Christ needed help sometimes, and he wasn't too proud to ask for it. — Robert McCammon

Meg spends her days at a shit job she hates and spends most of the rest of her time working out and starving herself, so she's usually in a bitchy mood because she pretty much hates her life, but definitely needs a sandwich. Contradicting that shit, she doesn't have a problem pouring alcohol down her throat and smoking a shitload of grass, which gives her the munchies she refuses to give into, thus the vicious cycle with her bein' a bitch and makin' the mellowing qualities of pot lost on her. — Kristen Ashley

Peaches and Cheese:
The vagabond sun winks down through the trees,
While lilacs, like memories, waft on the breeze,
My friend, I was born for days such as these,
To inhale perfume,
And cut through the gloom,
And feast like a king upon peaches and cheese!
I'll travel this wide world and go where I please,
Can't stop my wand'ring, it's like a disease.
My only regret as I cross the high seas:
What I leave behind,
Though I hope to find,
My own golden city of peaches and cheese! — Rachel Hartman

I fled Him down the nights and down the days
I fled Him down the arches of the years
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind, and in the midst of tears
I hid from him, and under running laughter. — Francis G. Thompson

Even that was all consumed after two days, and the patients had to try to choke down fresh fish, just boiled in water, without salt, pepper or butter; mutton, beef, and potatoes without the faintest seasoning. — Nellie Bly

Now my wandering days are over. It will be bliss to settle down. Bliss. There's a word, now. Bliss to love and to be loved. — Betty Smith

Rainy days and Mondays always get me down. — Karen Carpenter

I've been doing morning pages: the first thing I do when I wake up is sit down and write three pages of whatever comes into my head. The more I do them, the more creative I get and the smaller my problems seem. I can turn something that I hated a few days ago into a short story or a song. — T. Mills

It's just a shirt. I have no emotional connection to it or the band. I just didn't feel like coming to work topless today."
Camden's hand slammed down on the counter. "Shit, are there days that you come topless? I would like to make sure I'm here for that. — Ashlan Thomas

I had no eyelashes left. So when I cried, the tears rolled down, unabated to my mouth. My saliva tasted those days, like a salt lake. Or so he said.'
('Left from Dhakeshwari') — Kunal Sen

There's a long-standing (50 year old) flame war within the field over whether it's "sci-fi" or "SF".SF has traditionally been looked down on by the literary establishment because, to be honest, much early SF was execrably badly written - but these days the significance of the pigeon hole is fading; we have serious mainstream authors writing stuff that is I-can't-believe-it's-not-SF, and SF authors breaking into the mainstream. If you view them as tags that point to shelves in bricks-and-mortar bookshops, how long are these genre categories going to survive in the age of the internet? — Charles Stross

Safe Sex
If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident
they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;
if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire
only the tribute of another's cry; if they employ each other
as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel
then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,
no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,
no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated
apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond's edge — Donald Hall

While also, importantly, not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of 'difficult' poetry are over, because we live in a pluralist culture and there's room for 'difficult' poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won't be for everyone, but everyone should have the choice. — Andrew Motion

The river was behind him. The wind was full of acid. In the slow float of light I looked away, down at the river. On the brink of freezing, it gleamed in large, bulging blisters. The water, where it still moved, was black and braided. And it occurred to me then how it took hours, sometimes days, for the surface of a river to freeze over - to hold in its skin the perfect and crystalline world - and how that world could be shattered by a small stone dropped like a single syllable. — Nam Le

In the old days, before I was married, or knew a lot of women, I would just pull down all the shades and go to bed for three or four days. I'd get up to shit. I'd eat a can of beans, go back to bed, just stay there for three or four days. Then I'd put on my clothes and I'd walk outside, and the sunlight was brilliant, and the sounds were great. I felt powerful, like a recharged battery. But you know the first bring-down? The first human face I saw on the sidewalk, I lost half my charge right there. — Charles Bukowski

Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts
its precise date is unknown. The iconclasm laid down by Muhammed was absolute: you must resist attachment not only to painted images, but to natural ones. Ramadan, Muharram, the Eids; you associate no religious event with the tang of snow in the air, or spring thaw, or the advent of summer. God permeates these things
as the saying goes, Allah is beautiful, and He loves beauty
but they are transient. Forced to concentrate on the eternal, you begin to see, or think you see, the bones and sinews of the world beneath its seasonal flesh. The sun and moon become formidable clockwork. They are transient also, but hint at the dark planes that stretch beyond the earth in every direction, full of stars and dust, toward a retreating, incomprehensible edge — G. Willow Wilson

Penny for your thoughts,' asked Gwen.
'Cheapskate,' said Ianto. 'Never heard of inflation? Thoughts are a bit pricier than that these days.'
'OK,' said Gwen. 'A pint down the local tomorrow for your thoughts.'
Ianto smiled. 'That's more like it. — David Llewellyn

3And in those days a whirlwind carried me off from the earth, and set me down at the end of the heavens. 4There I saw another vision, the dwelling-places of the holy and the righteous. 5Here my eyes saw their dwellings with His righteous angels and the holy. And they asked, interceded, and prayed for the children of men, and righteousness flowed before them like water, and mercy like dew upon the earth. Thus it is among them forever. — Ken Johnson

A patient suffering with cancer of the throat was informed of a new X-ray machine that would cure his condition. This man could neither read nor write, nor was he informed about any of the instruments or procedures of medical practice. When he first sat down in the doctor's office and received into his mouth a thermometer with which the doctor sought to take his temperature, he believed he was undergoing X-ray treatment. The doctor, alert to the practices of psychology, recognized this, and after leaving the thermometer in the patient's mouth for ten minutes, excused him and told him to return in two days. Three weeks of treatment with a thermometer cured this patient's cancerous condition! Obviously, it wasn't the thermometer that did it. It was Faith! — Uell S. Andersen

The problem was that Panama technically belonged to Colombia, which refused to sign a treaty leasing it to the United States. So Roosevelt sent a gunboat filled with marines down to Panama, just on the off chance that a revolution might suddenly break out, and darned if one didn't, two days later. Not only that, but the leaders of the new nation of Panama-talk about lucky breaks!-were absolutely thrilled to have the United States build a canal there. 'Really, it's our pleasure,' they told the marines, adding, 'Don't shoot.' — Dave Barry

The humans aren't stupid, no matter what the purebloods say; they're just blind, and sometimes, that's worse. They put their fear in stories and songs, where they won't forget it. "Up the airy mountains and down the rushy glen, I dare not go a-hunting for fear of little men." We've given them plenty of reasons to fear us. Even if they've almost forgotten - even if they only remember that we were beautiful and not why they were afraid - the fear was there before anything else. There were reasons for the burning times; there's a reason the fairy tales survive. And there's a reason the human world doesn't want to see the old days come again. — Seanan McGuire

I had just 15 days to work on my body for the climactic fight of 'Bodyguard.' And I would work on every muscle of my body two/three times a week. I would have developed a superb body if I had three months, but squeezing it into 15 days can be harmful. Also, as you grow older, your metabolic rate slows down. — Salman Khan

That was it. She came out of it. She never had such a down as that or such an up as the three days that preceded it, not ever again in her life. The rest of her life was like a long thin line with little diminuendos and tiny little crescendos, and friends visiting from out of town. — Sheila Heti

I see companies these days where thoughts of "exits" are foremost in the minds of top management and board, and it is so clear that this value will infect the decision making down to the smallest choice by the most junior employee. Do we create something that is good, or just that seems good and might get us acquired or funded? — Brad Stone

If they went down right now, the nearest ship is four days steaming away, and that's not good. — Mike Kendrick

The dream is over. I gotta get down to reality. The good old days is garbage. — John Lennon

Every time I create something, whether an idea or a work of art, initially, its supposed completion seems absolutely perfect to me. However the more I think about it, stare it down, the more it marinates in my soul over the hours, days, and weeks, the more flaws I start to find in it; and finally, the more I'm pressed to continue enhancing it. It essentially turns out that whatever thing a flawed and imperfect, human eye once thought was amazing begins to appear quite wretched. This is why, eternally, God cannot be impressed by mere talents or by mortal achievements. To perfect eyes, I imagine that great is not really that great; rather, humility is ultimately a human being's true greatness. — Criss Jami

Suppose I say summer, write the word "hummingbird," put it in an envelope, take it down the hill to the box. When you open my letter you will recall those days and how much, just how much, I love you. — Catherine McKenzie

Ten times the Shechinah came down unto the world: - At the garden of Eden (Gen. iii. 8); at the time of the Tower (Gen. xi. 5); at Sodom (Gen. xviii. 21); in Egypt (Exod. iii. 8); at the Red Sea (Ps. xviii. 9); on Mount Sinai (Exod. xix. 20); into the Temple (Ezek. xliv. 2); in the pillar of cloud (Num. xi. 25). It will descend in the days of Gog and Magog, for it is said (Zech. xiv. 4), "And His feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives" (the tenth is omitted in the original). — Maurice H. Harris

Is that why you came?'
'No, I came because I simply can't get enough of people looking down their noses at me. The girls at school are getting frightfully lax about it.'
'Are they? How remiss of them. We're taught from the cradle how to look down our noses, you know, we rich sons of bitches. Perhaps Westcliffe's curriculum is a tad too liberal these days. — Shana Abe

I find my greatest happiness in thinking of those days in Homestead when I labored to bring a thing to perfection entirely by myself. In the evenings, I would go into the hills and look down on my work, and I knew that it was good, and my heart was elated. — Charles M. Schwab

She was impressed by its simplicity and its seriousness, and the rage she had cultivated with so much love for so many days faded away on the spot. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We had no sleep or days off or anything like that and then, when the band became big, Hendrix became a star and looked down at us lot. — Noel Redding

On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a long strip of paper with his
trotter, would read out to them lists of figures proving that the production of
every class of foodstuff had increased by two hundred per cent, three hundred
per cent, or five hundred per cent, as the case might be. The animals saw
no reason to disbelieve him, especially as they could no longer remember very
clearly what conditions had been like before the Rebellion. All the same, there
were days when they felt that they would sooner have had less figures and more
food. — George Orwell

Sophia and Grandmother sat down by the shore to discuss the matter further. It was a pretty day, and the sea was running a long, windless swell. It was on days just like this
dog days
that boats went sailing off all by themselves. Large, alien objects made their way in from sea, certain things sank and others rose, milk soured, and dragonflies danced in desperation. Lizards were not afraid. When the moon came up, red spiders mated on uninhabited skerries, where the rock became an unbroken carpet of tiny, ecstatic spiders. — Tove Jansson

I once thought that grief was chronic, that all you could do was appreciate the good days and take them along with the bad. And then I started to think that maybe the good days aren't just days; maybe the good days can be good weeks, good months, good years. Now I wonder if grief isn't something like a shell. You wear it for a long time and then one day you realize you've outgrown it. So you put it down. — Taylor Jenkins Reid

I think I'm a very pretty girl. I'm never going to pretend to think otherwise. There are even days I feel I'm fabulously hot and sexy. I'm grateful for my looks. My family is doing well because of them. I can make career choices and turn down movies because of them and I have been making money from them for 17 years. My looks are who I am. — Milla Jovovich

She blew a stream of smoke up at the empty clotheslines. 'These silly dreams you have when you're young. I mean, what, Katie and Brendan Harris were going ot make a life in Las Vegas? How long would that little Eden have lasted? Maybe they'd be on their second trailer park, second kid, but it would have hit them sooner or later - life isn't happily ever after and golden sunsets and shit like that. It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves the burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But, shit, you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything -because that's what growing older is. — Dennis Lehane

I gasp, and his mouth swoops down. He's kissing me, violently. Briefly our teeth clash, then his tongue is in my mouth.
Desire explodes like the Fourth of July throughout my body, and I'm kissing him back, matching his fervor, my hands knotting in his hair, pulling it, hard. He groans, a low sexy sound in the back of his throat that reverberates through me, and his hand moves down my body to the top of my thigh, his fingers digging into my flesh through the plum dress.
I pour all the angst and heartbreak of the last few days into our kiss, binding him to me, and it hits me - in this moment of blinding passion - he's doing the same, he feels the same. — E.L. James

I discovered a new thing in the Lord's Prayer that kind of hit me. "on earth as it is heaven" to me it means whatever you take out into the world is what you're going to draw out. like those days when you're all yang and no yin, and you're fighting with people inside, and you can't calm yourself down, and suddenly you're pulled over by the cops. everything goes wrong in the same day because you created it. so, if you get heaven within you, it'll be all around you. if hell is within you, it'll be around you. it's always created here first. — Jim Carrey

I will go back to the great sweet mother,
Mother and lover of men, the sea.
I will go down to her, I and none other,
Close with her, kiss her, and mix her with me.
Cling to her, strive with her, hold her fast;
O fair white mother, in days long passed
Born without sister, born without brother,
Set free my soul as thy soul is free. — Algernon Charles Swinburne

Summer fades; the first cold, Northern air
Sweeps, like hatred, through still days -
The August heat now gone elsewhere,
To Southern, bird-filled coasts and bays;
Amid constricting vales of cloud,
A pale and liquid Autumn sun
That once beat down on an empty plain
And may again. And may again. — Trevor Howard

Like normal people, leftists now have to get up in the morning and earn a living, seeing as the fascists have come down so hard on social welfare fraud, and this is the cruel reality. The good old days are gone, and increasingly, leftists are to be found working in ordinary, proper jobs. — Michael Leunig

He felt disgruntled and obscurely let down at having paid good money to discover that the vision that had so irradiated his consciousness was a second-hand one. On the other hand, he told himself, probably it was better to hear that a phantom memory had come floating up out of some lecture of his student days than to be informed that he was going out of his mind. — Robert Silverberg

the company - that at the eleventh hour an old ship with a lower standard of speed had been put on in place of the vessel in which I had taken my passage. America was roasting, England might very well be stuffy, and a slow passage (which at that season of the year would probably also be a fine one) was a guarantee of ten or twelve days of fresh air. I strolled down — Henry James

But chivalry's day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys. — Hilary Mantel

am 100% committed to following the Badass plan. I will "show up" for myself for 21 days of this program and do exactly what the plan recommends. I will get rid of tempting foods in my house, and I will replace them with nutritious ones. I will prioritize my health and fitness from this day forward. I will make body-honoring choices, day by day. I agree that the plan is a lifestyle that I'm developing, not something I pick up and put down when I need it. I understand that to take care of my body is to nurture the most valuable physical resource I have. — Christmas Abbott

We all have our down days, but it's not hard to smile and say, 'Thank you.' — Yvette Nicole Brown

May blessings fall down upon you, all your days. — William Lavender

Grief is like a roller coaster. Somedays we feel up and other days we feel down. — Louise Suzanne Boyd

There was a reason these boys were still alive, though. Something made them stronger than the other kids, the ones who had died in the early days, who had simply lain down and given up, unable to cope with the terrible things that were happening in the world. These boys were survivors. The will to live was stronger than any other feelings. — Charlie Higson

Of the seven days God gave to us in a week, He said to take six, and use them for our business. Yet we think that we must have the seventh as well. It is like someone who, while traveling, comes upon a poor man in distress. Having but seven shillings, the generous person gives the poor man six, but when the wretch scrambles to his feet, he follows his benefactor to knock him down and steal the seventh shilling from him. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after being encircled for seven days. Hebrews 11:30 — Beth Moore

A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating. You're there now doing the thing on paper. You're not killing the goose, you're just producing an egg. So I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I've heard about it. I've felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I'd much rather go fishing, for example, or go sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write." There's no difference on paper between the two. — Frank Herbert

Things had certainly come down a long way since the great days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul. — Douglas Adams

Out of despair I decided to follow this horror through. I stared down at what I was already grasping in my hand, like an ape; I wrapped myself in the dust and took off my trousers.
Interwoven joy and terror strangled me within. I strangled and I gasped from pleasure. The more those pictures terrified me, the more intense was my excitement at the sight of them. After days of accumulating alarms, tensions, suffocations, I was beyond withstanding my own ignominy. I invoked it and I blessed it. It was my inevitable fate: my joy was all the greater since, with regard to life, I had long since entrenched myself in an attitude of suffering, and now, in the throes of delight, I progressed even farther into vileness and degradation. — Georges Bataille

Clevedon told the dressmakers that the previous tenants (a husband and wife) had fallen into dire financial difficulties within months of opening the place. They'd absconded in the dead of night mere days ago, owing three months' back rent. They must have borrowed or stolen a cart, because they'd taken away most of the shop's contents and fixtures.

This was a complete lie.

The truth was, Varley had bribed them to move and sweetened the offer by allowing them to take with them everything that wasn't nailed down. — Loretta Chase

I will know that only those with inferior ability can always be at their best, and I am not inferior. There will be days when I must constantly struggle against forces which would tear me down. Those such as despair and sadness are simple to recognize but there are others which approach with a smile and the hand of friendship and they can also destroy me. Against them, too, I must never relinquish control - — Og Mandino

Many fledgling moralists in those days were going about our town proclaiming there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down ... There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical. — Albert Camus

Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards. — John Kenneth Galbraith

I beg you to stop your arguing and listen. The prophets speak of this time, when the Chosen One of God will cleave us apart, separating the believers from those who will be cast into the outer darkness. Have you ever in all your days seen a time when the division has been clearer? Have you ever known a time when miracles rained down from an empty sky, when the prophets' words were so clearly being fulfilled? — Janette Oke

You have two choices: You can come down from the mountain and spend the rest of your days thinking it was so beautiful there, or you can create a vision, look upward, see the next mountain, and start the climb all over again. — Oprah Winfrey

Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. ...
And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold. — Milton Friedman

Currents of humid wind swept down the mountainside. The air across the beach snapped and shimmied, like a bedsheet shaken out - as though the beach itself were shaking off the violence that had just been visited upon it. Then a humid calm would prevail, for a few hours or a few days, until another storm rolled in. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Ah man. I remember the days of lying to my mother about a boy. Once I had a boy hidden in the closet and of course Mom wouldn't leave, so I finally had to pretend to get sick to my stomach just to get her out of the room long enough for him to climb out the window and down the tree. He fell, broke his leg. Ah, to be young again. — Amy Sherman-Palladino

Today as in the time of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth flourishes in Wales, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia; while around them cities have changed their masters and their names, collided and smashed, disappeared into nothingness, their peaceful generations have crossed down the ages as fresh and smiling as on the days of battle. — Edgar Quinet

I looked him up and down. Once before I'd seen Jericho Barrons wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It's like sheet-metaling a W16 Bugatti Veyron engine - all 1,001 horsepower of it - with the body of a '65 Shelby. The height of sophisticated power sporting in-your-face, fuck-you muscle. The effect is disturbing.
He had more tattoos now than he'd had a few days ago.when I'd last seen him wearing nothing but a sheen of sweat, his arms were unmarked. They were now sleeved in intricate crimson and black designs, from bicep to hand. A silver cuff gleamed in his wrist. There were chains on his boots.
"Slumming, huh?" I'd said
You should talk, said those dark eyes, as they swept my black leather ensemble. — Karen Marie Moning

Perfect days are just the world setting you up to rip you down. — Sue Lawson

I have been so great a lover: filled my days So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise, The pain, the calm, and the astonishment, Desire illimitable, and silent content, And all dear names men use, to cheat despair, For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear Our hearts at random down the dark of life. — Rupert Brooke

The world isn't perfect, and some days it wears you down. You can either accept that, and face it, and be a help to others instead of a hindrance. Or you can decide the rules are too tough and they shouldn't apply to you, and you can ignore them and make things harder for everybody else. Sometimes life is about being sad and doing things anyway. Sometimes it's about being hurt and doing things anyway. The point isn't perfection. The point is doing it anyway. — Chloe Neill

I know we've only known each other four weeks and three days, but to me it seems like nine weeks and five days. The first day seemed like a week and the second day seemed like five days. And the third day seemed like a week again and the fourth day seemed like eight days. And the fifth day you went to see your mother and that seemed just like a day, and then you came back and later on the sixth day, in the evening, when we saw each other, that started seeming like two days, so in the evening it seemed like two days spilling over into the next day and that started seeming like four days, so at the end of the sixth day on into the seventh day, it seemed like a total of five days. And the sixth day seemed like a week and a half. I have it written down, but I can show it to you tomorrow if you want to see it. — Steve Martin

Quite honestly, there are days when I don't need a God who will deliver me from the pit, just a God who will get down in a pit with me. — Josh Ross

The temperature in that hangar would sometimes get down to 40 degrees, and very often I had to put on long underwear, which was so restrictive I suffered from an acute vascular disorder for days afterward. — Larry David

Merton. Gethsemani required a vow of silence, and at dinner if you wanted salt, you had to stare hard at the shaker until another brother noticed. One day, cutting down a tree, Jack couldn't contain himself. He held his head back and roared, "Timber." After that, his days at the monastery were numbered. Within a couple of years, he had married, and he and his young wife, Fran, who herself had just spent a year in a nunnery, opened a Catholic Worker farm in eastern Missouri for recovering alcoholics. — Alex Kotlowitz

I dragged myself to my feet, and with my hellhound in tow started off once more through the fastness of the wood, feeling, as the poet did before me, that my companion would be with me through the nights and through the days and down the arches of the years, and I should never be rid of him. — Daphne Du Maurier

No one prepared me for the stress and insanity of a week leading up to a movie. Years and years of work come down to three days. — Evan Daugherty

September is a sweep of dusky, purple asters, a sumac branch swinging a fringe of scarlet leaves, and the bittersweet scene of wild grapes when I walk down the lane to the mailbox. September is a golden month of mellow sunlight and still clear days ... Small creatures in the grass, as if realizing their days are numbered, cram the night air with sound. Everywhere goldenrod is full out. — Jean Hersey

Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt's eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven't time to read. — David McCullough

You know what days these are? The days of Elijah. We are in the days of Elijah! Fire is falling down from heaven! — Benny Hinn

As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you detach yourself from everything. You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free. That nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you. You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments, in almost perfect happiness, fascinating, occasionally swollen by new emotions. You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing. You are invisible, limpid, transparent. You no longer exist. Across the passing hours, the succession of days, the procession of the seasons, the flow of time, you survive without joy and without sadness. Without a future and without a past. Just like that: simply, self evidently, like a drop of water forming on a drinking tap on a landing. — Georges Perec

These days I don't look to other people with the objective of trying to steal their licks, although I've got no objections to stealing them if that seems like a good idea. I'm sure that I'm still influenced by Mark Knopfler and Eddie Van Halen as well ... I can't play like Eddie Van Halen. I wish I could. I sat down to try some of those ideas and can't do it. I don't know if I could ever get any of that stuff together. Sometimes I think I should work at the guitar more. — David Gilmour

Out of the city and over the hill,
Into the spaces where Time stands still,
Under the tall trees, touching old wood,
Taking the way where warriors once stood;
Crossing the little bridge, losing my way,
But finding a friendly place where I can stay.
Those were the days, friend, when we were strong
And strode down the road to an old marching song
When the dew on the grass was fresh every morn,
And we woke to the call of the ring-dove at dawn.
The years have gone by, and sometimes I falter,
But still I set out for a stroll or a saunter,
For the wind is as fresh as it was in my youth,
And the peach and the pear, still the sweetest of fruit,
So cast away care and come roaming with me,
Where the grass is still green and the air is still free. — Ruskin Bond

We have a new king now," Cersei Lannister replied. "Lord Eddard, when last we spoke, you gave me some counsel. Allow me to return the courtesy. Bend the knee, my lord. Bend the knee and swear fealty to my son, and we shall allow you to step down as Hand and live out your days in the grey waste you call home. — George R R Martin

I almost never these days sit down with a CD or my laptop and just listen to a piece with a score. I probably would do that while I'm exercising. — Tod Machover

The magic in these Masonic rituals is very, very old. And way back in those days, it worked. As time went on, and it started being used for spectacle, to consolidate what were only secular appearances of power, it began to lose its zip. But the words, moves, and machinery have been more or less faithfully carried down over the millennia, through the grim rationalizing of the World, and so the magic is still there, though latent, needing only to touch the right sensitive head to reassert itself. — Thomas Pynchon

...the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another world, parallel to but apart from their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional realm is not 'real' and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling. A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives, long after we have laid the book asie. It is an exercise of make-believe that, like yoga or a religious festival, breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies, so that we are able to empathise with others lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to 'feel with' others. And, like mythology, an important novel is transformative. If we allow it to do so, it can change us forever. — Karen Armstrong

A woman is never so happy as when she is being wooed. Then she is mistress of all she surveys, the cynosure of all eyes, until that day of days when she sails down the aisle, a vision in white, lovely as the stefanotis she carries, borne translucent on her father's manly arm to be handed over to her new father-surrogate. If she is clever, and if her husband has the time and the resources, she will insist on being wooed all her life; more likely she will discover that marriage is not romantic, that husbands forget birthdays and aniversaries and seldom pay compliments, are often perfunctory. — Germaine Greer

Every time I do a movie, I'm reading the script, or if it's something I have coming up, I'm reading the script, and I just spend hours and hours and days and weeks and months going over the script and just writing a lot of different ideas down, finding a little dialogue or just coming up with ideas for scenes and moments and all that kind of stuff. — Mark Wahlberg

They gathered after mass, sang hymns and read. Everyone had grown even more serene; beneath the sisters' kerchiefs it was as if there were no faces. When they met Daryushka - it was as if they bowed down lower. She was walking in the Spirit.

Daryushka was entirely serene. She was thinking of nothing, had turned within herself, peering inside; and inside her all was smiling ever so gently.

After the storm clear days came, frosty, crackling, clear days. Snow and sky, snow and sky, and the sky was even brighter, whiter, from the snow - and the snow sparkled with blue fires from the sky.

Daryushka went down to the river with buckets, to the ice-hole. She went down to the landing alone... Snow, and sky, and brilliance...

("He Has Descended") — Zinaida Gippius

Ellington Feint was a line in my mind running right down the middle of my life, separating the formal training of my childhood and the territory of the rest of my days. She was an axis, and at that moment and for many moments afterward, my entire world revolved around her. — Lemony Snicket

Erah Graesin had a silky, low voice. It was reputed to be sexy, but then, everything about Terah Graesin was supposed to be sexy. Kylar didn't see it. Oh, she was pretty. She had a wide mouth, full lips, and the kind of figure that was unattainable for the majority of noblewomen who spent their days doing nothing more strenuous than issuing orders to the servants. Maybe it was that she was a little too self-consciously good-looking. She wore lots of makeup - expertly applied and subtle, but lots - and had tweezed her eyebrows down to tiny lines. The truth was, she held herself like he ought to admire her, and it pissed him off. What pissed him off more was that to look her in the eye with his disguise, he had to stare straight at her admittedly perky breasts. Dammit, why were breasts so intriguing? — Brent Weeks

I always wonder about raindrops.
I wonder about how they're always falling down, tripping over their own feet, breaking their legs and forgetting their parachutes as they tumble right out of the sky toward an uncertain end. It's like someone is emptying their pockets over the earth and doesn't seem to care where the contents fall, doesn't seem to care that the raindrops burst when they hit the ground, that they shatter when they fall to the floor, that people curse the days the drops dare to tap on their doors.
I am a raindrop.
My parents emptied their pockets of me and left me to evaporate on a concrete slab. — Tahereh Mafi

What I look for these days is that I don't have long speeches, the characters gets to sit down a lot, I don't have to learn any foreign languages, and it doesn't shoot in Minneapolis in February. That's mainly what I look for. — Alan Arkin

Soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife. Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life. But as we go our sordid sep'rate ways, We shall ne'er forget thee, thou golden college days. Hearts full of youth, Hearts full of truth, Six parts gin to one part vermouth. — Tom Lehrer

Chapter 30 Jones looked at the list of names on his notepad. The team had made a lot of progress over the last few days in tracking down and interviewing many acquaintances of the late professor. Pretty soon, it would be time to start re-interviewing some of those that the team were — Paul Gitsham

I used to spend a couple of hours in the weight room, but really, an hour is long enough. I lift twice a week and on other days incorporate more core yoga and different exercises. It's important to listen to your body. I will shut it down if I'm tired. — Misty May-Treanor

I vary my days between skiing and snowboarding - I can go fast down pisted runs but still struggle in the bumps on a snowboard. — Mike Tindall