Fretted Quotes & Sayings

A fiery soul, which, working out its way, Fretted the pygmy-body to decay, And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay. A daring pilot in extremity; Pleas'd with the danger, when the waves went high He sought the storms. — John Dryden

Once more September marveled that even the Dodo knew what she wanted to be when she was grown. She simply could not think what she herself might do. September expected that destinies, which is how she thought of professions, simply landed upon one like a crown, and ever after no one questioned or fretted over it, being sure of one's own use in the world. It was only that somehow her crown had not yet appeared. She did hope it would hurry up. — Catherynne M Valente

I fretted so much about my earthly interactions that I had very few interactions to speak of. — Louisa Hall

I fretted myself about the mistakes of government, like other people; but finding myself every day grow more angry, and the government growing no better, I left it to mend itself. — Oliver Goldsmith

The walls were hung with rich tapestries representing the Triumph of Beauty. A large press, inlaid with agate and lapis-lazuli, filled one corner, and facing the window stood a curiously wrought cabinet with lacquer panels of powdered and mosaiced gold, on which were placed some delicate goblets of Venetian glass, and a cup of dark-veined onyx. Pale poppies were broidered on the silk coverlet of the bed, as though they had fallen from the tired hands of sleep, and tall reeds of fluted ivory bare up the velvet canopy, from which great tufts of ostrich plumes sprang, like white foam, to the pallid silver of the fretted ceiling. A laughing Narcissus in green bronze held a polished mirror above its head. On the table stood a flat bowl of amethyst. — Oscar Wilde

The truth is, when you are very poor, that 11 percent bites into the very bones of your existence. Eleven percent less means choosing between electricity, or food - electricity and food that is already rationed, and fretted over. Eleven percent is not very much - but, when you are very poor, it may form the bedrock of your survival. — Caitlin Moran

A brittle smile worked across my face, and I drew back from her. "See you later, Mom."
She picked up her handbag, and sauntered out into the hallway. Jack looked around the doorjamb, his gaze sliding over me. "I'll be back in a minute."
By the time Jack had returned, I had downed a shot of tequila from the pantry, hoping the liquor would burn through my head-to-toe numbness. It hadn't. I felt like a freezer that needed to be defrosted. Luke fretted in my arms, making impatient noises, wriggling.
Jack came to me and touched my chin, forcing me to meet his searching gaze.
"Now aren't you sorry you didn't take my advice and leave?" I asked morosely.
"No. I wanted to see what you grew up with."
"I guess you can tell why Tara and I both needed therapy."
"Hell, I need therapy, and I only spent an hour with her. — Lisa Kleypas

I use both instruments with their strengths in mind. Mandolin - no sustain and attack of the right hand, for rhythm. Fiddle - use sustain of the bow and the ability to slide the non-fretted notes, like singing. — Sam Bush

In my youth, I should have chafed and fretted under the irritation of my own unreasonable state of mind. In my age, I knew better, and went out philosophically to walk it off. — Wilkie Collins

When we are chafed and fretted by small cares, a look at the stars will show us the littleness of our own interests. — Maria Mitchell

Fourth cat?" "The fourth must be found soon," fretted Broken — Erin Hunter

He must have pressed the wrong button, or several of them, for when the door fretted open he found himself deep underground, with no heart to try again. The corridor was dark, the air heavy with must, the rooms on both sides quiet yet stirring, as though numb people within were digging themselves out. — Douglas Woolf

Being a developmental psychologist didn't make me any better at dealing with my own children, no. I muddled through, and, believe me, fretted and worried with the best of them. — Alison Gopnik

his mother, who had never been able to manage him, sent him to school to get rid of him, lamented his absence till he returned, then writhed and fretted under his presence until again he went. — George MacDonald

I have of late
but
wherefore I know not
lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. — William Shakespeare

Caleb," Lily whispered. He turned from the horses to glance at her curiously. "What?" "Indians," she managed to say. "Over there, on the rise!" He turned in a leisurely fashion to look toward the hillside, making no move to take his pistol from its holster or dive for the rifle Lily had seen him put under the seat back in Tylerville. "Son of a gun," he remarked, sounding interested but not alarmed. Impatient, Lily started to reach under the seat. "No sudden moves, sodbuster," Caleb warned calmly without even glancing in her direction. "They don't take well to things like that." Lily sat still as a stone, her fingers itching for the rifle even though she didn't have the faintest idea what to do with it. Do something! she wanted to scream as the Indians rode down the hill at a cautious pace. "They'll probably scalp me," she fretted through her teeth. "If they don't, I will," Caleb replied. At — Linda Lael Miller

Had Mary Shelley fretted so? Maybe yes, maybe no. She'd begun her classic work on a dare. Had culled a dream to bring it into being. But it was not lost on Laura that the story might be a prolonged exercise in Shelley's personal terrors. The subtitle of the work was 'Prometheus Unbound,' and Laura wondered if Shelley herself was not Prometheus in the form of the wandering monster, who desperately sought love and acceptance but was ultimately driven to face an icy landscape that seemed almost fantastical - the way our own subconscious could be, white and frozen-slippery. — L.L. Barkat

Holmes laid out a continental drift theory that was in its fundamentals the theory that prevails today. It was still a radical proposition for the time and widely criticized, particularly in the United States, where resistance to drift lasted longer than elsewhere. One reviewer there fretted, without any evident sense of irony, that Holmes presented his arguments so clearly and compellingly that students might actually come to believe them. Elsewhere, — Bill Bryson

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

Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. — James Joyce

I hear of this love so often that I think I know it, but I don't feel it, and I myself don't know why,' he fretted. 'These people who love and then the girlfriend goes away - they cut their arms with a blade, they put a cigarette butt out on their hand, they won't sleep, they won't eat, they'll sing - they must have different hearts than mine. — Katherine Boo

Marshalsea and all its blighted fruits. They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted — Charles Dickens

The oceans of art are awash with people who can't paint. When those who can't paint notice those who can, they are sometimes not inclined to accept them as serious like themselves. It's an unfortunate quirk of human nature and ought not to be fretted over. — Robert Genn

One day we had one of those freak storms when the sky turned blue-black and the lightning fretted a silver filigree across it. And then had come the rain - great, fat, heavy drops, as warm as blood. When the storm had passed, the sky had been washed to the clear blue of a hedge-sparrow's egg and the damp earth sent out wonderfully rich, almost gastronomic smells as of fruit-cake or plum pudding; and the olive trunks steamed as the rain was dried off them by the sun, each trunk looking as though it were on fire. — Gerald Durrell

Won't I be showing?" Libby fretted, looking from Julie to Paige. "Looking like a pillow smuggler in my wedding dress wasn't part of the fantasy, ladies. — Linda Lael Miller

In the Ondariva gardens the branches spread out like the tentacles of extraordinary animals, and the plants on the ground opened up stars of fretted leaves like the green skins of reptiles, and waved feathery yellow bamboos with a rustle like paper. — Italo Calvino

Everyone in the room knew about leveraged buyouts, often called LBOs. In an LBO, a small group of senior executives, usually working with a Wall Street partner, proposes to buy its company from public shareholders, using massive amounts of borrowed money. Critics of this procedure called it stealing the company from its owners and fretted that the growing mountain of corporate debt was hindering America's ability to compete abroad. Everyone knew LBOs meant deep cuts in research and every other imaginable budget, all sacrificed to pay off debt. Proponents insisted that companies forced to meet steep debt payments grew lean and mean. On one thing they all agreed: The executives who launched LBOs got filthy rich. — Bryan Burrough

As mankind grew obsessed with its hours, the sorrow of lost time became a permanent hole in the human heart. People fretted over missed chances, over inefficient days; they worried constantly about how long they would live, because counting life's moments had led, inevitably, to counting them down. Soon, in every nation and in every language, time became the most precious commodity. — Mitch Albom

I might mention all the divine charms of a bright spring day, but if you had never in your life utterly forgotten yourself in straining your eyes after the mounting lark, or in wandering through the still lanes when the fresh-opened blossoms fill them with a sacred silent beauty like that of fretted aisles, where would be the use of my descriptive catalogue? — George Eliot

But Michael was out of sight. She waited. Were it not for the ballast of her big belly, she would casually stand, stretch a bit, casually stretch her neck until she got a glimpse of him. Casually because her husband said she worried too much, fretted too much, and would eventually infect their boys with her fearfulness - had, perhaps, already, in Jacob's case, infected them with her fearfulness. So she waited, trusting, but feeling, too, the pins-and-needles prick of blown sand on her cheek and her forearm (was the wind changing?) until, sure enough, there was the top of his head, the tip of his plastic machine gun, just over the next dune. — Alice McDermott

This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? — William Shakespeare

Oh, it was delicious to have someone to keep secrets with. If I'd had a sister or a brother closer in age, I guessed that's what it would be like. But it wasn't just smoking or skirting around Mother. It was having someone look at you after your mother has nearly fretted herself to death because you are freakishly tall and frizzy and odd. Someone whose eyes simply said, without words, You are fine with me. — Kathryn Stockett

And although he hadn't fretted over whether his life was worthwhile, he had always wondered why he, why so many others, went on living at all; it had been difficult to convince himself at times, and yet so many people, so many millions, billions of people, lived in misery he couldn't fathom, with deprivations and illnesses that were obscene in their extremity. And yet on and on and on they went. So was the determination to keep living not a choice at all, but an evolutionary implementation? Was there something in the mind itself, a constellation of neurons as toughened and scarred as tendon, that prevented humans from doing what logic so often argued they should? And yet that instinct wasn't infallible - he had overcome it once. But what had happened to it after? Had it weakened, or become more resilient? Was his life even his to choose to live any longer? — Hanya Yanagihara

Memories are not dead things, but alive; they dwindle in disuse, but they harden and develop in all sorts of queer ways if they are being continually fretted. — H.G.Wells

I read and learned and fretted more about Canada after I left than I ever did while I was home. I absorbed anything I could on topics that ranged from Folklore to history to political mainifestos ... I ranted and raved and seethed about things beyond my control. In short I acted like a Canadian. — Will Ferguson

As the year goes on, certain deputies - and others, high in public life - will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours' manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuke
to these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats.
While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just's cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker. — Hilary Mantel

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art. — William Wordsworth

My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. — Henry David Thoreau

On that day, in jungle hamlets and mountain villages, in cacophonous slums and sprawling refugee camps, on worn concrete floors and under roofs thatched of rice straw and banana leaves, in clay brick homes, on rutted, red dirt roads, and on scorching swaths of sand, children cried and screamed and sang and giggled and toddled and ran and fell and got back up and climbed on their mothers' laps and pulled their siblings' hair and gazed out in wonder at the big, bright world that swirled around them. Millions of boys and girls whose lives were reclaimed whose stories were allowed to continue, who were not mourned or grieved or buried, but instead were loved and held and fretted over and scolded and prepared for the challenges of living, of surviving, all because of a man they had never met and whose name they would likely never know. — Adam Fifield

Before it was just her infernal curves that fretted me, but now I've taken her whole soul into my soul, and through her I've become a man! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted. — Olive Schreiner

After everything he'd built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life; one disappointing son and two suitcases. — Khaled Hosseini

It's like he never wanted anything, but only thought and fretted about what he should want, what other people wanted him to want. — Jardine Libaire

Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau - and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me. — H.G.Wells

Oh my god" Meg ranted. "Her water just broke!"
Margaret" Eve said, "get a grip - and a towel. I'll be there in five minutes."
(After her sister is off to the hospital and Meg comes close to hyperventalating)
Shouldn't we have called an ambulance or something?" Meg fretted.
Oh for heavens sakes," Eve replied. "You don't need an ambulance!"
Not for me, Mother for Sierra. — Linda Lael Miller

So will I build my altar in the fields, And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields Shall be the incense I will yield to thee. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment. — Samuel Johnson

Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surrounds. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never dies, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau
and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me. — H.G.Wells

Long before folks fretted the demise of 'quantitative easing,' I fretted its existence. It proved the reverse of its image, an antistimulus, and we've done okay not because of it, but despite it. — Kenneth Fisher

It wasn't all that long ago that he'd stood where I did, that my mom's face was one of many in his
world. And yet, despite all the impediments and all the time that had passed, they were still deeply in
love.
It was obvious in everything, from their shared room to the way they fretted over each other to the
way they seemed to be incapable of not flirting with each other even after being married so long. — Kiera Cass

This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o-erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire. — William Shakespeare

My eyes returned to our suitcases. They made me sad for Baba. After everything he'd built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life: one disappointing son and two suitcases. Someone — Khaled Hosseini

Especially on Broadway, composers and lyricists fretted over their creations, obsessed over every rhyme, every critical chord or interval. The stakes were so high. On Broadway, people were watching and judging, especially newspaper critics who knew a thousand ways to slice and dice a songwriter for the entertainment of hundreds of thousands of faithful readers. There was no anonymity for the Broadway songwriter. Even the best could find themselves stripped naked the morning after by the tastemakers and their readers. — Michael Kosser

Michael had watched his father crawl inside a bottle and die there just so he didn't have to get up and go to work. It wasn't long before his mom retreated behind a vacant gaze, leaving him and his sister to pay the bills, to change her stinking bags, to roll her from one sunny patch by the window to another. His mother had become a potted plant they fretted over. No, that wasn't right. Couldn't plants at least turn their heads and follow the sun? Weren't they better than her in that way? — Hugh Howey

The little cares that fretted me, I lost them yesterday Among the fields above the sea, Among the winds at play. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I could never be the kind of writer who went to the set of the movie and fussed and fretted about, 'Oh, that dialogue's wrong,' or 'That character doesn't look like that.' That would be insufferable. — Alan Moore

Marvelously clear-fretted in the unsmoked air, the Abbey rose, silver-grey. It stood detached by the serenity of age from the ephemeral growths around it. It was solid on a foundation of centuries, destined, perhaps, for centuries yet to preserve within it the monuments to those whose work was now all destroyed. I did not loiter there. In years to come I expect some will go o look at the old Abbey with romantic melancholy. But romance of that kind is an alloy of tragedy with retrospect. I was too close. — John Wyndham

There was no such thing as pure happiness. How many years it took to learn that! Always some dark fretted thing which unbalanced the ease one had laboriously found. — Anya Seton

Streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, — Charles Dickens

During the Reagan years the left fretted about "two hundred billion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see." What were annual deficits under Reagan became monthly deficits under Obama. In less than eight years, Obama has doubled the national debt. — Dinesh D'Souza