Quotes & Sayings About Fending For Yourself

I once heard a man say he knew there was a God, he just didn't think he needed Him. It is nice to take care of yourself and be independent, but it is also nice to know that you have a resource to rely on in times of need. If you are used to fending entirely for yourself, then when a catastrophe occurs you will expend a lot of energy looking for help at a time when you need your energy looking for help at a time when you need your energy for creative work. — Bernie Siegel

Being a spy was something like standing on the south shore fending off a hurricane with a $2 poncho and an umbrella. — Lynn Blackmar

It works because the principle of personal space is always the same, whether you're fending off an elemental or someone's bad mood. It's a force field around yourself, and as long as our imagining powers are weak, it's useful to have something to remind us. — Jeanette Winterson

Seagulls dove among corpses and survivors alike. Turner later told his son, Norman, that he found himself fending off attacks by the birds, which swooped from the sky and pecked at the eyes of floating corpses. Rescuers later reported that wherever they saw spirals of gulls, they knew they would find bodies. Turner's experience left him with such a deep hatred of seagulls, according to Norman, that until his retirement he used to carry a .22 rifle and shoot every seagull he could. — Erik Larson

We were having a ... discussion. I told him I needed to think about what he'd said and then he said I didn't need to think, I live in my head, I shut things out. He says I haven't given him me. He says I have a hand held up, fending him off," I answered. Tracy and Camille's eyes went back to each other. "See you do that too," Elvira noted. — Kristen Ashley

Those years [as the war progressed] would show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, and that in fending them off in his own government, a President would need all the help he possibly could get, not the least of which should be a powerful Secretary of State. — David Halberstam

I'm sure you could have. Fending off unwanted male attention is a skill every attractive woman must acquire. But you're also a lady who was reluctant to cause a scene.. (Hammond Cross) — Sandra Brown

Oooh, dinner and a show! How come you never take us to dinner and a show?"
He smiled at Roxy. "I would spend the entire evening fending off the hordes of your admirers."
She fanned herself and grinned back at him. "You gotta love all that suave debonairness! — Katie MacAlister

I wonder if I love the communal act of eating so much because throughout my childhood, with four older brothers and a mom who worked in the restaurant business, I spent a lot of time fending for myself, eating alone - and recognizing how eating together made all the difference. — Thomas Keller

An ideal day starts with putting on a good, smart, fun show where I learn something and ends with me fending off atomic knee drops from my two kids in our no-holds-barred pillow fight/steel cage matches. They are a ruthless tag team. — Willie Geist

Jane and Elizabeth tried to explain that all five of them were capable of fending for themselves; that they could make tolerable fortunes as bodyguards, assassins, or mercenaries if need be. — Seth Grahame-Smith

She was crushed by society like a mosquito fending for its unborn young — Owen Jones

Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need and fending off the causes of their dissolution. — Daniel Dennett

I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery. — Zoe Heller

Fending for oneself alone on a desert island is really no laughing matter. It is no crying one either — Virginia Woolf

Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world. — Sigmund Freud

Foggy hangover ... fending off sloth and torpor ... the battle within!!!!! — Mukesh Kwatra

Sleeping under the moon and stars in the arms of a naked lover, the two of you cradled by furs and soft leaves, lulled by the gentle murmur of the chestnut trees and the far-off rumble of a waterfall, is terribly romantic. Sleeping under a crude lean-to, squashed into a soggy mass between a large, wet husband and an equally large, equally wet nephew, listening to rain thrump on the branches overhead while fending off the advances of a immense and thoroughly saturated dog, is slightly less so. — Diana Gabaldon

The key, I think, is to hold true to your own aesthetics, that which you value, and yield to no one the power to become the arbiter of your tastes. You must also learn to devise strategies for fending off both attackers and defenders. Exploit aggression, but only in self-defence, the kind of self-defence that announces to all the implacability of your armour, your self-assurance, and affirms the sanctity of your self-esteem. Attack when you must, but not in arrogance. Defend when your values are challenged, but never with the wild fire of anger. Against attackers, your surest defence is cold iron. Against defenders, often the best tactic is to sheathe your weapon and refuse the game. Reserve contempt for those who have truly earned it, but see the contempt you permit yourself to feel not as a weapon, but as armour against their assaults. Finally, be ready to disarm with a smile, even as you cut deep with words. — Steven Erikson

There was a sound of steel meeting steel. Devin flung a desperate look over his shoulder, saw Hewet fending off two men behind him, and looked ahead in time to see ten men in light armor ride out of the trees up ahead and drive straight for him. He almost swallowed the flute.

He threw an arm over his face, too shocked to be terrified, and waited to die. — Amy Bai

At last, after weeks of daily fending off, you get your bearings back, and somewhat dazed you tell yourself: No, there is not more beauty here than elsewhere, and all these objects which generation after generation have continued to admire, which inexpert hands have mended and restored, they mean nothing, and are nothing and have no heart and no value; but there is a great deal of beauty here, because there is beauty everywhere. — Rainer Maria Rilke

In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we've created is a way of fending off mortality. — Joshua Foer

It's such a huge playing field, especially with the wind and shifting tides and only three women out. It's almost like you are fending for yourself out there. — Malia Manuel

As soon as the doors were closed, Amelia went to her sister with her hands raised. At first Cam thought she intended to shake her, but instead Amelia pulled Beatrix close, her shoulders trembling. She could barely breathe for laughing.
"Bea ... you did it on purpose, didn't you? ... I couldn't believe my eyes ... that blasted lizard running along the table ... "
"I had to do something," the girl explained in a muffled voice. "Leo was behaving badly - I didn't understand what he was saying, but I saw Lord Westcliff's face - "
"Oh ... oh ... " Amelia choked with giggles. "Poor Westcliff ... one moment he's def-fending the local population from Leo's tyranny, and then Spot comes s-slithering past the bread plates ... "
"Where is Spot?" Twisting away from her sister, Beatrix approached Cam, who deposited the lizard in her outstretched palms. "Thank you, Mr. Rohan. You have very quick hands."
"So I've been told." He smiled at her. — Lisa Kleypas

Being a professional musician doesn't mean you spend 12 hours a day playing music. It means you spend up to 12 hours a day taking care of business, dealing with litigation, with the various characters who've stolen your interests, or fending off hostile lawsuits from former members of the band. — Robert Fripp

Or at least of fending him off for long enough that we can sweep in heroically like the Seventh Cavalry.' Burning tipis and shooting women and children, I thought. And — Ben Aaronovitch

I shouldn't have come," I said.
"Of course you should've. Otherwise I'd be fending off advances from Mrs. Stone. — Brodi Ashton

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's
the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance
as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off. — Jonathan Lethem