Flit Quotes & Sayings

The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes - in a soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the garden-floor, of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes, in the type of ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where terrace-walls were warm, in the blue-frocked brass-labelled officialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references of a straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaitered red-legged soldier. He watched little brisk figures, figures whose movement was as the tick of the great Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from point to point; the air had a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a white-capped master-chef. The — Henry James

As Annwyl turned away, Keirran rose swiftly, not touching her but very close. "I'm not afraid of exile," he said quietly, and the Summer girl closed her eyes. "And I don't care what the courts say. My own parents defied those laws, and look where they are now." His hand rose, gently brushing her braid, causing several butterflies to flit skyward. "I would do the same for you, if you just gave me the chance- — Julie Kagawa

Although there is validity, I believe, in leaving a church where the leadership consistently presents false doctrine, I also see people who are offended by one remark from the pulpit or one perceived hurt flit to the next church to look for fault there. It's like the cartoon I saw of a skeleton dressed in women's clothes and sitting on a park bench; the caption read, 'Waiting for the perfect man.' There is no perfect church either. — David Jeremiah

The folk of Riverton have all been dead so long. While age has withered me, they remain eternally youthful, eternally beautiful. There now. I am becoming maudlin and romantic. For they are neither young nor beautiful. They are dead. Buried. Nothing. Mere figments that flit within the memories of those they once knew. But of course, those who live in memories are never really dead. The first time — Kate Morton

Feather's sake, you are so fucking annoying, I love you."
Warmth blossomed under Flit's skin, like a spark had been lit inside his heart and it had exploded in his chest, messy and wet and wonderful. "You love me?"
"It's that or indigestion," Talon replied gruffly. He peppered Flit's forehead and cheeks with kisses. — Agatha Bird

Women have in their natures something akin to owls and fireflies. While men grow stupid and sleepy towards evening, they become brighter and more open-eyed, and show a propensity to flit and sparkle under the light of chandeliers. — Abba Louisa Goold Woolson

Beautiful thoughts flit across the brain, like butterflies in the sun's rays, and are as difficult to capture. — Anna Cora Mowatt

People who succeed tend to find one goal in the distant future and then chase it through thick and thin. People who flit from one interest to another are much, much less likely to excel at any of them. School asks students to be good at a range of subjects, but life asks people to find one passion that they will follow forever. — David Brooks

You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then. — Thomas Hardy

On any given day, something claims our attention. Anything at all, inconsequential things. A rosebud, a misplaced hat, that sweater we liked as a child, an old Gene Pitney record. A parade of trivia with no place to go. Things that bump around in our consciousness for two or three days then go back to wherever they came from ... to darkness. We've got all these wells dug in our hearts. While above the wells, birds flit back and forth. — Haruki Murakami

Do anything but love; or if thou lovest and art a woman, hide thy love from him whom thou dost worship; never let him know how dear he is; flit like a bird before him; lead him from tree to tree, from flower to flower; but be not won, or thou wilt, like that bird, when caught and caged, be left to pine neglected and perish in forgetfulness. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Thus thought I, as by night I read Of the great army of the dead, The trenches cold and damp, The starved and frozen camp,
The wounded from the battle-plain, In dreary hospitals of pain, The cheerless corridors, The cold and stony floors. Lo! in that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom And flit from room to room. And slow, as in a dream of bliss, The speechless sufferer turns to kiss Her shadow, as it falls Upon the darkening walls. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

So here was my predicament: I knew that within myself was a Golconda of memories of other lives, yet I was unable to do more than flit like a madman through those memories. I had my Golconda but could not mine it. — Jack London

I've never been afraid of ghosts. I live with them daily, after all. When I look in a mirror, my mother's eyes look back at me; my mouth curls with the smile that lured my great-grandfather to the fate that was me. No, how should I fear the touch of those vanished hands, laid on me in love unknowing? How could I be afraid of those that molded my flesh, leaving their remnants to live long past the grave? ... All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hiding in the future. We look in the mirror and see shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our own ghosts; we haunt ourselves. — Diana Gabaldon

Pleasures flit by - they are only for yourself; work leaves a mark of long-lasting joy, work is for others. — Dmitri Mendeleev

And yet the wise are of opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and melancholy multitude. — W.B.Yeats

A fascinating account sourced from many previously unpublished letters and archives. Boyd's characters flit on the surface of the city like water beetles, unaware of the depths below.

(Review of Julia Boyd's non-fiction "A Dance with the Dragon; The Vanished World of Peking's Foreign Colony — Frances Wood

One lies there," I thought, "who will soon be beyond the war of earthly elements. Whither will that spirit -- now struggling to quit its material tenement -- flit when at length released? — Charlotte Bronte

Look back, hold a torch to light the recesses of the dark. Listen to the footsteps that echo behind, when you walk alone.
All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hiding in the future. We look in the mirror and see the shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves.
Each ghost comes unbidden from the misty grounds of dream and silence.
Our rational minds say, "No, it isn't."
But another part, an older part, echoes always softly in the dark, "Yes, but it could be. — Diana Gabaldon

Opportunities flit by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone. — Jerome K. Jerome

Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back. — David Foster Wallace

I stabbed him," Flit said weakly, clutching at the tattered remains of Talon's shirt.
"With pens," Talon agreed.
"Is he dead?" Flit's eyes were huge, the pupils blown black, only a sliver of color showing around the edges. He was probably going into shock.
"I don't think so," Talon said. "It's pretty hard to die by pen. — Agatha Bird

Talon thought kissing Flit to shut him up might be a good idea.
He was wrong.
It was a fucking great idea. — Agatha Bird

My brother looked at me. I looked at him.
Sometimes- and I know it doesn't last for anything more than a second- sometimes there can be perfect understanding between two people who can't stand each other. He smiled, and I smiled, and we put on the Timex watches on, and we watched the seconds flit by.
It was the first watch my brother had ever owned.
It was the first watch I had ever owned. — Gary D. Schmidt

Through the side window, a screen of late-afternoon sunlight is projected onto the wall. Shadows of birds flit across it.
Some shadows are sharp, some shadows are blurry.
I've seen them before in another time and place. — David Mitchell

Ye come and go incessant; we remain Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so nobly realized as this. — James Russell Lowell

Summer is a prodigal of joy. The grass Swarms with delighted insects as I pass, And crowds of grasshoppers at every stride Jump out all ways with happiness their guide; And from my brushing feet moths flit away In safer places to pursue their play. In crowds they start. I marvel, well I may, To see such worlds of insects in the way, And more to see each thing, however small, Sharing joy's bounty that belongs to all. And here I gather, by the world forgot, Harvests of comfort from their happy mood, Feeling God's blessing dwells in every spot And nothing lives but owes him gratitude. — John Clare

Not treasured wealth, nor the consul's lictor, can dispel the mind's bitter conflicts and the cares that flit, like bats, about your fretted roofs. — Horace

Prayer is always hard work, and often an agony. We sometimes have to wrestle even in order to pray. "When those hours of the day come in which we should be having our prayer-sessions with God, it often appears as though everything has entered into a conspiracy to prevent it." We often wrestle in prayer just to concentrate. "Your thoughts flit back and forth between God and the many pressing duties which await you."226 While God can and will grant times of peace and tranquility, no Christian outgrows the need to struggle and persevere in prayer. — Timothy Keller

To Hope
When by my solitary hearth I sit,
And hateful thoughts enwrap my soul in gloom;
When no fair dreams before my 'mind's eye' flit,
And the bare heath of life presents no bloom;
Sweet Hope, ethereal balm upon me shed,
And wave thy silver pinions o'er my head. — John Keats

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve. — W.B.Yeats

And as if by magic - and it may have been magic, for I believe America is the land of magic, and that we, we now past Americans, were once the magical people of it, waiting now to stand to some unguessable generation of the future as the nameless pre-Mycenaean tribes did to the Greeks, ready, at a word, each of us now, to flit piping through groves ungrown, our women ready to haunt as laminoe the rose-red ruins of Chicago and Indianapolis when they are little more than earthen mounds, when the heads of the trees are higher than the hundred-and-twenty-fifth floor - it seemed to me that I found myself in bed again, the old house swaying in silence as though it were moored to the universe by only the thread of smoke from the stove. — Gene Wolfe

A little while, their hunger unfulfilled,
The mothlike worlds flit 'round the guttering sun.
("Ephemera") — George Sterling

Time doth flit; oh shit. — Dorothy Parker

The heavy is the root of the light. The unmoved is the source of all movement. Thus the Master travels all day without leaving home. However splendid the views, she stays serenely in herself. Why should the lord of the country flit about like a fool? If you let yourself be blown to and fro, you lose touch with your root. If you let restlessness move you, you lose touch with who you are. — Laozi

Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkle from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then. Yet — Thomas Hardy

He'd had, perhaps, too much wine. Enough to weaken a certain resolve, the one having to do with recognizing his own maturity, that host of years behind him of which he was constantly reminded by the dwindling number of covetous glances flung his way. True, one might call it experience, settling for those women who knew enough to appreciate such traits. But a man's mind was quick to flit from how things were to how he wanted them to be, or, even worse, to how they used to be. As the saying went, when it came to the truth, every man was a duellist sheathed in the blood of ten thousand cuts. — Steven Erikson

Here with my beer I sit, while golden moments flit: alas! They pass unheeded by: and as they fly, I, being dry, sit idly sipping here, my beer. — George Arnold

We don't have time for all this personal drama." My eyes flit between Logan, Haydn, and Ax. "And it's not fair on the others. The atmosphere is horrendous because of what's going on between us. And I'm so tired of it. All of it." I take a step back. "I'm not discussing this anymore, with any of you." I glare at the three boys. "So sort your shit out, and get your act together. Until then," I say, turning around. "Leave me the hell alone. — Siobhan Davis

The creative writer is compulsively concrete ... His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions ... — Wallace Stegner

But which of us can hope to probe with questioning finger the dim thoughts that flit in a fool's head? — Flann O'Brien

When I feel ill, cinema pictures of the circumstances of my death flit across my mind's eye. I cannot prevent them. I consider the nature of the disease and all I said before I died- something heroic, of course! — W.N.P. Barbellion

I taste the wine on his lips. He kisses me gently at first and then, as if he's reaching for something more, he pushes me against the wall and kisses me harder. His lips are warm and so soft - his hair brushes against my face. I try to focus. (Not his first time. He's definitely kissed other girls before, and quite a few at that. He's - he seems like he's short of breath ... ) The details flit away. I grab at them in vain. It takes me a moment to realize I'm kissing him just as hungrily. I feel the knife at his waist against my own skin, and I tremble. It's too warm here, there's too much heat on my face. — Marie Lu

So our student will flit like a busy bee through the entire garden of literature, light on every blossom, collect a little nectar from each, and carry it to his hive ... — Desiderius Erasmus

For the next couple of weeks she held Peter like a secret in her heart, lying right under her necklace. I could see him written on her face, and Tik Tok, too, seemed to catch shadows of him, because he'd stop to stare at her, puzzled, as if he'd just seen the boy flit across her eyes-seen the ghost of the kiss lingering for a second on the skin of her neck before disappearing. — Jodi Lynn Anderson

I watched her and I watched the birds' shadows flit across her face, and I ... wanted. I wanted more happy memories to hang up on the ceiling, so many happy memories with this girl that they would crowd the ceiling and flap out into the hall and burst out of the house. — Maggie Stiefvater

I was always decoding. I was hyperalert.
Being hyperalert is a lasting thing. Being a watcher. Noticing emotional shirts, infinitesimally small tremors that flit over another person's face, the jab in a seemingly innocuous word, the quickening in a walk, an abrupt gesture - the way, say, a jacket is tossed over a chair. — Delia Ephron

Our growing addiction to the Internet is impairing precious human capacities such as memory, concentration, pattern recognition, meaning-making, and intimacy. We are becoming more restless, more impatient, more demanding, and more insatiable, even as we become more connected and creative. We are rapidly losing the ability to think long about any- thing, even those issues we care about. We flit, moving restlessly from one link to another. — Margaret J. Wheatley

I'd never want to be trapped. I never like to stay in one place too long. I always flit around, I never settle anywhere. So being married would be being trapped. — Maisie Williams

Some people
Never find the right kind of love
you know, the kind that steals
your breath away.
Like diving into a snowmelt.
The kind that jolts your heart,
sets it beating apace.
An anxious hiccuping of hummingbirds wings.
The kind that makes every terrible minute apart feel like hours.
Days.
Years.
Some people flit from one insane possibility to the next.
Never experincing the connection of two people.
rocked by destiny.
Never knowing what it means to love someone else,
more than themselves.
More than life itself, or the promise of something better.
Beyond this world,
More even (forgive me!) than god.
Lucky me, I found the right kind of love.
With the wrong person. — Ellen Hopkins

There is nothing more beautiful, I think, than the evanescent fleeting images and sentiments presented by a language one is just becoming familiar with - ideas that flit across the mental sky, shaped and tinted by capricious fancy. — Helen Keller

Life, believe, is not a dream
So dark as sages say;
Oft a little morning rain
Foretells a pleasant day.

Sometimes there are clouds of gloom,
But these are transient all;
If the shower will make the roses bloom,
O why lament its fall ?

Rapidly, merrily,
Life's sunny hours flit by,
Gratefully, cheerily,
Enjoy them as they fly !

What though Death at times steps in
And calls our Best away ?
What though sorrow seems to win,
O'er hope, a heavy sway ?

Yet hope again elastic springs,
Unconquered, though she fell;
Still buoyant are her golden wings,
Still strong to bear us well.

Manfully, fearlessly,
The day of trial bear,
For gloriously, victoriously,
Can courage quell despair ! — Charlotte Bronte

But surely it is something to have been
The best beloved for a little while,
To have walked hand in hand with Love, and seen
His purple wings flit once across thy smile. — Oscar Wilde

The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches — Edith Wharton

If we were spirits we would use crises as an oppurtunity to flit, change shape, become airborne or take to the trees. We might change from water to wood, or wood to wind. — Marion Coutts

What a fine affair it would be if we could flit across the Atlantic as they say the angels do from planet to planet. — John Adams

I was walking up and down the rows of books at the antiquarian bookseller's in Karlova Street. Now and then I would take a look out the shop window. It started to snow heavily; holding a book in my hand I watched the snowflakes swirling in front of the wall of St Savior's Church. I returned to my book, savoring its aroma and allowing my eyes to flit over its pages, reading here and there the fragment of a sentence that suddenly sparkled mysteriously because it was taken out of context. I was in no hurry; I was happy to be in a room that smelled pleasantly of old books, where it was warm and quiet, where the pages rustled as they were turned, as if the books were sighing in their sleep. I was glad I didn't have to go out into the darkness and the snowstorm. — Wieslaw Mysliwski

You are such a dork," I exclaim as my fingers flit over the multitude of images and videos of Will Smith. Pinned quotes and sayings are highlighted, and I chuckle when I recognize a few. "Oh. My. God. Did you actually learn these on purpose?"
He reels me into his arms and kisses the top of my head. "Will I be cementing my dork status if I answer affirmatively?"
"Absolutely." I look up into his beautiful eyes. "But I only love you more for it. — Siobhan Davis

The lands are lit with all the autumn blaze of golden-rod, and everywhere the purple asters nod and bend and wave and flit. — Helen Hunt

For decades I'd flit from drawing table to typewriter to guitar with no sense of strain or contradiction. They all exercised the same psychic muscle (the Imagination), and working in one medium refreshed my appetite for the others. — Peter Blegvad

He tried to picture her in battle, covered in gore and swinging a blade - would she be silent and barbarous or would she flit through the fray, making sarcastic comments as she casually dealt deathblows? — Bethany K. Lovell

Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives - trying to go home again. And also like all men perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone. — Rod Serling

In practice, the Internet functions more frequently as a hive of distraction, a simulated world through which most of us flit from one context to the next ... — Steve Almond

Where are we going" My eyes flit to the clock. 2 a.m.
"We're taking a trip."
I wipe my splotchy cheeks. "To Hogwarts?" I ask hopefully. — Krista Ritchie

I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. [ ... ] It is afternoon, it is night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this bed, this endless slumber that makes the days into one day, makes time stop, stretches and compacts time until it is meaningless. — Audrey Niffenegger

Silence
THERE is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave - under the deep, deep sea,
Or in wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
No voice is hush'd - no life treads silently,
But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,
That never spoke, over the idle ground:
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
Though the dun fox or wild hyaena calls,
And owls, that flit continually between,
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan -
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone. — Thomas Hood

Sometimes, but only for a moment, I saw a faint solitary
figure with a Rosa veiled face, and carrying a faint torch, flit among the dancers, but like a dream within a
dream, like a shadow of a shadow, and I knew by an understanding born from a deeper fountain than thought,
that it was Eros himself, and that his face was veiled because no man or woman from the beginning of the
world has ever known what love is, or looked into his eyes, for Eros alone of divinities is altogether a spirit,
and hides in passions not of his essence if he would commune with a mortal heart. So that if a man love nobly
he knows love through infinite pity, unspeakable trust, unending sympathy; and if ignobly through vehement
jealousy, sudden hatred, and unappeasable desire; but unveiled love he never knows. — W.B.Yeats

He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being. — Vladimir Nabokov

I wish I wasn't so in love, wasn't so interested, in the Internet. I wish I spent less time online and more time outside and in my head. Writing requires solitude and deep, deep daydreaming, and the Internet just kills that - its lure is toward the external; it asks you to flit from place to place. — Edan Lepucki

What if butterflies just exist to bring color and joy to the world? What if their sole purpose in life is to freely flit around and remind us that we are born with the innate ability to not only survive, but to fly?" He was being profound and poetic, while she was being scientific. Mary grew silent and thought before she spoke. "Maybe so, but they don't live forever." "Neither do we or any other thing on the planet. It's butterflies' abilities to happily fly despite everything around them that makes them free. — Nicole Renee Wyatt

Sometimes
and I know it doesn't last for anything more than a second
sometimes there can be perfect understanding between two people who can't stand each other. He smiled, and I smiled, and we put the Timex watches on, and we watched the seconds flit by. — Gary D. Schmidt

May with its light behaving
Stirs vessel, eye and limb,
The singular and sad
Are willing to recover,
And to each swan-delighting river
The careless picnics come
In living white and red.

Our dead, remote and hooded,
In hollows rest, but we
From their vague woods have broken,
Forests where children meet
And the white angel-vampires flit,
Stand now with shaded eye,
The dangerous apple taken.

The real world lies before us,
Brave motions of the young,
Abundant wish for death,
The pleasing, pleasured, haunted:
A dying Master sinks tormented
In his admirers' ring,
The unjust walk the earth.

And love that makes impatient
Tortoise and roe, that lays
The blonde beside the dark,
Urges upon our blood,
Before the evil and the good
How insufficient is
Touch, endearment, look. — W. H. Auden

Youngest Brother, swan's wing,
where one arm should be, yours the shirt
of nettles short a sleeve
and me with no time left to finish --
I didn't mend you all the way back into man
though I managed for your brothers;
they flit again from court to playing-courts
to courting, while you station yourself,
wing folded from sight, avian eye
to the outside, no rebuke meant but love's.
Was it better then, the living on the water,
the taking to air...?

("Ever After," from the book 'The Poets' Grimm') — Debora Greger

An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world. — Aldous Huxley

He well knew his mind's natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose
indeed, he called it his butterfly mind. — Eric Metaxas

Rapidly, merrily, Life's sunny hours flit by, Gratefully, cheerily Enjoy them as they fly! — Charlotte Bronte

Sometimes, sport is just plain pleasing to the eye, like watching La Belle France flit by on television during the Tour de France. I can do that for hours. — George Vecsey