Fitfully Quotes & Sayings

If one undertakes retrospection of the day's events, one must do it regularly at the appointed hour, not fitfully, not doing it today, neglecting to do it tomorrow and the day after and then taking it up again on the fourth day. Such irregular practice is not conducive to the confirmation of the habit of retrospection. — Mahavira

The phrase "Rest in peace" seems incredibly self-serving. It basically means, "Stay in your grave. Don't haunt me." The opposite would be "Fitfully toss" or "Go jogging. — Jenny Lawson

You are unnerving the hell out of me, Valkyrie."
"oh" she frowned, petting her bat fitfully " I must have misread the future for the past." she shrugged. "It happens. — Kresley Cole

World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. — Stephen Jay Gould

I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality - talk, footsteps, slamming doors - which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream. — Donna Tartt

On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational
to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of. — Martin Amis

The stranger did not go to church, and indeed made no difference between Sunday and the irreligious days, even in costume. He worked, as Mrs. Hall thought, very fitfully. Some days he would come down early and be continuously busy. On others he would rise late, pace his room, fretting audibly for hours together, smoke, sleep in the armchair by the fire. Communication with the world beyond the village he had none. His temper continued very uncertain; for the most part his manner was that of a man suffering under almost unendurable provocation, and once or twice things were snapped, torn, crushed, or broken in spasmodic gusts of violence. He seemed under a chronic irritation of the greatest intensity. His habit of talking to himself in a low voice grew steadily upon him, but though Mrs. Hall listened conscientiously she could make neither head nor tail of what she heard. — H.G.Wells

Passing into higher forms of desire, that which slumbered in the plant, and fitfully stirred in the beast, awakes in the man. — Henry George

The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come. — Herman Melville

Stray bits of Lego edged fitfully about among lower strata, like bright rectilinear beetles. — William Gibson

I work fitfully, in hope rather than in expectation, invent methods which last a week, and fill notebooks with tiny, illegible writing which often defies my own attempts to decipher it. — Anthony Minghella

Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. [ ... ] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction. — Stephen Jay Gould

In human life and in the history of faith, I think, love has a quality of a bedrock reality we discover - adventurers, travelers, each of us, only fitfully apprehending its potential. I take some solace in the fact that I'm not alone in this intuition that the reality of evil, of injustice, of suffering notwithstanding, "at the center of this existence is a heart beating with love." That's how Desmond Tutu put it to me, with greater authority than mine from a life that has known extremes of human cruelty one to another. — Krista Tippett

For it is difficult to speak, even any old rubbish, and at the same time focus one's attention on another point, where one's true interest lies, as fitfully defined by a feeble murmur seeming to apologize for not being dead. And what it seemed to me I heard then, concerning what I should do, and say, in order to have nothing further to do, nothing further to say, it seemed to me I only barely heard it, because of the noise I was engaged in making elsewhere, in obedience to the unintelligible terms of an incomprehensible damnation. — Samuel Beckett

Spring passed and summer passed into harvest and in the hot autumn sun before winter comes Wang Lung sat where his father had sat against the wall. And he thought no more about anything now except his food and his drink and his land. But of his land he thought no more what harvest it would bring or what seed would be planted or of anything except of the land itself, and he stooped sometimes and gathered some of the earth up in his hand and he sat thus and held it in his hand, and it seemed full of life between his fingers. And he was content, holding it thus, and he thought of it fitfully and of his good coffin that was there; and the kind earth waited without haste until he came to it. — Pearl S. Buck

But here we call it Spring, when a young man's fancy turns,
fitfully, lightly, to idling in the sun,
to touching in the dark. And the old man's?
To worms in their garden box; stepping aside
a moment in a poem that will remember,
fitfully, who made it and the discord
and stammer, and change of heart and catch of breath
it sprang from. A bending down
lightly to touch the earth. — David Malouf

In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality. — Steve Erickson

The eye speaks with an eloquence and truthfulness surpassing speech. It is the window out of which the winged thoughts often fly unwittingly. It is the tiny magic mirror on whose crystal surface the moods of feeling fitfully play, like the sunlight and shadow on a still stream. — Henry Theodore Tuckerman

Some things don't pass, the injuries don't heal they merely find a place in our guts and in our bones where they fitfully rest, tossing and turning between our knuckles and ribs waiting to wake as the shadows grow long. — Toby Barlow

Fear is concealed in smiles and flashing teeth. 'Please say you still love me,' the kings and queens are really saying. And, when they fare badly, they return to their palaces and sleep fitfully. — Shirley Maclaine

There were dragons, in his dreams, as though some part of him knew the trials were not yet over, that there were battles yet to be fought. He slept fitfully, fidgeting, tossing and turning, groaning and crying out in his sleep. — Barry Lyga

Simon," I say, and swallow again, "you're being idiotic."
"Because I like this better than fighting?"
"There is no 'this'!" I protest.
"You slept in my arms," he says.
"Fitfully. — Rainbow Rowell

From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought. — Alfred North Whitehead

A few stray bits of Lego edged fitfully about among lower strata, — William Gibson

They say that we are all haunted by a Spiritual Presence, of whose existence we are only fitfully and sometimes never conscious, — William T. Stead

The life of sense begins by assuming that we can only fitfully live the life of reason. — Louis Kronenberger

It would be idle to say that we were not, from time to time, aware that a volcano slumbered fitfully beneath us. There were dark sides to the Slavery Question, for master, as for slave. — Mary Virginia Terhune

For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal-this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life. — George Eliot

Saints and bodhisattvas may achieve what Christians call mystical union or Buddhists call satori
a perpetual awareness of the force at the heart of the heart of things. For these enlightened few, the world is always lit. For the rest of us, such clarity comes only fitfully, in sudden glimpses or slow revelations. Quakers refer to these insights as openings. When I first heard the term from a Friend who was counseling me about my resistance to the Vietnam War, I though of how on an overcast day, sunlight pours through a break in the clouds. After the clouds drift on, eclipsing the sun, the sun keeps shining behind the veil, and the memory of its light shines on in the mind. — Scott Russell Sanders

The rain is playing its soft pleasant tune fitfully on the skylight, and the shade of the fast-flying clouds across my book passed with delicate change. — Nathaniel Parker Willis

Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces.

At meetings I was earnest, enthusiastic, and committed; among friends, unconstrained and given to teasing; with Marketa, cynical and fitfully witty; and alone (and thinking of Marketa), unsure of myself and as agitated as a schoolboy.

Was the last face the real one?

No. They were all real: I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be. (I was frightened by the differences between one face and the next; none of them seemed to fit me properly, and I groped my way clumsily among them.) — Milan Kundera

An eerie, chilling voice interrupted him to reverberate through the house.

"You believe you are safe, but you will never be safe from me. My reach is limitless, my capabilities legion. Sleep fitfully and avoid the shadows, for know that I am coming for you. When I arrive, you will pay for what you did. — G.S. Jennsen