Fumbling Quotes & Sayings

George Bush ran a campaign where he bragged about being an anti-intellectual, dismissing his Harvard and Yale pedigree, pretending he was an American every day, ordinary everyman, and as a result of that, played up his fumbling speech because it signified that he was a good guy. That is deeply and profoundly anti-intellectual. — Michael Eric Dyson

Without you, I'm lost, fumbling and falling
Missing so much of who you were
If I could change the past, I'd take it all back
I'd turn back time, I'd take away the pain
I'd make sure I didn't leave without you — Monica Alexander

And somewhere, in a black California morning, some hour before dawn, amid the corridors, the galleries, the faces of dream, fragments of conversation she half-recalled, waking to pale fog against the windows of the master bedroom, she prized something free and dragged it back through the wall of sleep. Rolling over, fumbling through a bedside drawer, finding a Porsche pen, a present from an assistant grip, she inscribed her treasure on the glossy back of an Italian fashion magazine: — William Gibson

The shoes represent my ability to provide foot coverings for you and maybe one day our children." Fane cleared his throat and continued, fumbling along as he went.
"You see, it is important that you know that you won't be without something on your feet, so-" Jacque held up her hand to stop Fane from going any further.
"There are no shoes in this box, are there?" Fane shook his head once. "Not one."
Loftis, Quinn (2011-11-18). Blood Rites: Book 2 Grey Wolves Series (The Grey Wolves Series) (p. 243). Kindle Edition. — Quinn Loftis

History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had -
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes. — Robert Lowell

The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers: They call it 'easing the Spring.' — Henry Reed

In the clearing he saw a creature. Some eight feet tall, it was built along the lines of a dragon, with teeth like a T. rex and a slashing pair of front claws. The thing flickered in the moonlight, its powerful body and tail covered with iridescent purple and lime-green scales. "What the hell is that?" Butch whispered, fumbling to make sure the door was locked. "Rhage in a really bad mood." The — J.R. Ward

Being with you is the best thing that's ever happened to me, the one perfect decision I've made in a lifetime of fumbling and poor judgment. I'd go through it all again to be by your side. Never doubt that. Never doubt how I feel about you. — Richelle Mead

I'm back in these regions of fumbling dark uncertain creation, but it's my one and only world, and I'll do the best I can. — Jack Kerouac

You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself."
"Hang on, can I write this down?" said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil. — Douglas Adams

Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth Stupid fumbling. — Robert A. Heinlein

Up and away for life! be fleet!-
The frost-king ties my fumbling feet,
Sings in my ears, my hands are stones,
Curdles the blood to the marble bones,
Tugs at the heart-strings, numbs the sense,
And hems in life with narrowing fence.
Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep,-
The punctual stars will vigil keep,-
Embalmed by purifying cold;
The winds shall sing their dead-march old,
The snow is no ignoble shroud,
The moon thy mourner, and the cloud. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I remember trying not to disrupt everyone else in the room, fumbling around trying to figure out how to use the medium with a beautiful model disrobed in front of me ... — Don Watson

Trying to go through life on our own, is like fumbling around in the dark ... God sent Jesus to light the way. — Heather Hart

There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps. — Edna O'Brien

Last week they shot a woman, right about here. She was a Martha. She was fumbling in her robe, for her pass, and they thought she was hunting for a bomb. They thought she was a man in disguise. There have been such incidents. Rita and Cora knew the woman. I heard them talking about it, in the kitchen. Doing their job, said Cora. Keeping us safe. — Margaret Atwood

I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that. — Lewis Thomas

A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is like a beautiful hand with long fingers reaching out to pluck a perfect fruit, without error,for the accurate eye knows well it is growing just there on the branch, while Ulysses is the fumbling of a horned hand in darkness after a doubted jewel. — Rebecca West

I remember her body so miraculously
Fumbling with me so delicately
Fighting with me so passionately
Exhausting us both so mercilessly
Before sleeping beside me so languidly. — Roman Payne

Still feel like talking?" she murmured against his mouth.
In response, he tore her panties down with a speed and finesse that left her speechless. She heard him rummage in his pocket and a foil wrapper rip, then he tugged her back in his lap, her knees on either side of him. He kissed her while she felt between them, fumbling for his c#ck and finding it already sheathed in latex. The knowledge that it was in preparation to fuck her made her dizzy with want. — Lux Zakari

We pissed each other off, royally and frequently in those early days. But we were getting better, bit by bit. I stopped thinking he was going to cage me and he stopped thinking I was trying flee. The poetry was not lost on us. He had abandonment issues and I had commitment issues. Go figure. Also, the sex which had been fumbling and awkward at the beginning of the relationship got really hot, we figured that was a promising sign general relationship progress.
Mostly though we realized it was about leaving the doors and windows of the relationship wide open. That way he could see in, and I could see out. — Amanda Palmer

It isn't a first kiss. It isn't even their first kiss. But it feels like one.
Not because it is fumbling or awkward. Not because she doesn't know where to put her hand, or he doesn't know where to put his nose. None of those. They slot together like puzzle pieces. As Allyson and Willem kiss for the first time in a year, both are thinking the same thing: This feels new.
Though perhaps thinking is not the right term, because with a kiss like this, thinking goes out the window and something more instinctual takes over: inner voices, gut instincts. 'Knowing it in your kishkes' is how Willem's saba would've described it.
In his kishkes, Willem is marveling at how Allyson found him, as Yael found Bram. He doesn't know how it happened, only that it did happen and that it means something. — Gayle Forman

But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates. That gesture, for instance, the red hand picking up the cards and fumbling: it is all flabby. It would have to be ripped apart and tailored inside. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The heart of the difference between cheap-grace doctrines of guilt-free existence and the Christian gospel is this: Modern chauvinism desperately avoids the message of guilt by treating it as a regrettable symptom. Christianity listens to the message of guilt by conscientious self-examination. Hedonism winks at sin. Christianity earnestly confesses sin. Secularism assumes it can extricate itself from gross misdeeds. Christianity looks to grace for divine forgiveness. Modern consciousness is its own fumbling attorney before the bar of conscience. Christianity rejoices that God himself has become our attorney. Modernity sees no reason to atone for or make reparation for wrongs. Christianity knows that unatoned sin brings on misery of conscience. Modern naturalism sees no meed for God. Christianity celebrates God's willingness to suffer four our sins and redeem us from guilt. — Thomas C. Oden

All her words to him are like staying in a hotel, new and curious and tentatively fumbling for switches on the wall, repeatedly turning on different lights that those she wanted to turn on. — Fredrik Backman

Life can be hard and beautiful and messy, but hopefully, it will be long. If it is, you will see that it's unpredictable, and that the dark periods comes, but they abate
sometimes with a lot of support
and the tunnel widens, allowing the sun back in. If you're in the dark, it might feel like you will always be there. Fumbling. Alone. But you won't
and you're not. — Gayle Forman

The girl inhaled sharply at this last bit, the word 'father'. They leaned into Azalea's nightgown as Mr. Pudding, fumbling with his great ring of keys, locked the ballroom door with a click-click. Seeing the younger girls start to tear up, he gave them his lamp and promised to send biscuits and tea to their room, nearly crying himself. But he did not unlock the ballroom. — Heather Dixon

He imagined that his memoirs might now sound like those of an admirable stranger, a person he did not know but whom he immediately recognized and loved dearly. Instead, the voice he heard sounded nasally and pinched and, worse, not very well educated, as if he were a bumpkin who had been called, perhaps even in mockery, to testify about holy things, as if not the testimony but the fumbling through it were the reason for his presence in front of some dire, heavenly senate. — Paul Harding

It's the squares who know how to fly the fighter planes and operate the missiles and the bombs and work the M-16s. Liberals would still be fumbling with the federally mandated trigger locks. — P. J. O'Rourke

Blind funny little creatures they were, fumbling in the midst of a love they feared to acknowledge. To win, all they had to do was surrender but they could not perceive that. The beauty of what they could have been together made him ache. Is was a love he had been seeking all his life, a love to redeem and perfect him. That which he most desired, they feared and avoided. — Robin Hobb

1. Never forget
"they" are always the enemy.
2. Just remember, assholes are born that way, and they usually don't change.
3. You don't want to go to jail.
4. When you start to take this job seriously, you're in trouble.
5. It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad.
6. If you decide to run the ball, just count on fumbling and getting the shit knocked out of you a lot, but never forget how much fun it is just to be able to run the ball! — Jimmy Buffett

Heart as collapsed time, as a dug-up grave, as simple machine. Heart as big black bugs bleed blue blood. Heart as MI frozen as seen from airplane, everything still and white and beautiful. Heart as the Day the Music Died. Heart as love being made, as fucking, as a pleasantly haunted house. Heart as a dim memory of a dark room in which you're molded wetasscracked into a beanbag chair, fumbling for wetness. Come hither. Heart as a cunt's supposed to smell like tuna. Heart as the star of the sea. Heart as a pussy in permanent bloom. Heart as doxycycline. Heart as waxwings, as a fudge round, as the phone rings once and then stops. Heart as throw your hands in the air, throw your art at the stars, stutter and stare. Heart as a Stratocaster. Heart as Twin Reverb. Heart as I heart you so much. Heart as all that we thought we knew in the world disappears into vapor. Heart as the rest of your life times the weight of the world squared. — Bryan Charles

And behind it all I saw the ineffable malignity of primordial necromancy, black and amorphous, and fumbling greedily after me in the darkness to choke out the spirit that had dared to mock it by emulation. — H.P. Lovecraft

What is writing, after all, except fumbling in darkness endeavoring to light a candle? — Peggy Toney Horton

Suppose I were to be honest with you as I possibly could be, fooling you no more than I fool myself. Still, you wouldn't know me and I wouldn't know you, because no matter how much we cry for light, we are all sleepwalkers fumbling in the dark. Sometimes we manage to touch for a moment, than we pass". — Stirling Silliphant

Oh my God, I'd forgotten what this felt like."
"Not a lot of huggers in Hollywood, huh?"
"None like this - holy shit. Okay, I'm just going to kind of slump into you now. So if you're averse to that, say before I'm swamping your helpless body."
"I don't mind if you swamp."
"Are you sure? Because I think I'm a fumbling virgin at this."
"You're doing fine. In fact I think I'm close to a cuddling orgasm. — Charlotte Stein

We all perform our lives in a way. And the actor is a perfect metaphor to get at that theme of 'how do we find our authentic selves?' And that we all - whether we're actors or not - perform ourselves. As a way of searching. As a way of fumbling around and trying to say, is this my voice? Is this who I am? — Annette Bening

Beyond the electroliers, beyond the beat and toot of the small sidewalk cars, beyond the smell of hot fat and popcorn and the shrill children and the barkers in the peep shows, beyond everything but the smell of the ocean and the suddenly clear line of the shore and the creaming fall of the waves into the pebbled spume. I walked almost alone now. The noises died behind me, the hot dishonest light became a fumbling glare. Then the lightless finger of a black pier jutted seaward into the dark. This would be the one. I turned to go out on it. Red — Raymond Chandler

Watercolour painting is notoriously difficult - so much depends on directness and speed, and certainty of intention. Tentative or fumbling touches are disastrous, for they cannot be obliterated easily. — Walter J. Phillips

McKisco's contacts with the princely classes in America had impressed upon him their uncertain and fumbling snobbery, their delight in ignorance and their deliberate rudeness, all lifted from the English with no regard paid to factors that make English philistinism and rudeness purposeful, and applied in a land where a little knowledge and civility buy more than they do anywhere else - an attitude which reached its apogee in the "Harvard manner" of about 1900. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright. — Anthony Burgess

The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long life seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed.
.. — Virginia Woolf

I wanted to hate Jake, of course, but as I watched them together, smiling and fumbling all over each other, I didn't hate him. I wanted to be him, sure, but I tried to remember I was ostensibly on a date with someone else. — John Green

I can see him juggling the words inside his head. Fumbling. I tried to juggle once, with three apples I'd found in the pantry. But I just ended up bruising them all so badly my mother had to make apple bread. The whole time I was trying, I kept getting lost in the movements. I couldn't concentrate on all of them at once.
I wish Cole would give me an apple. And then he looks at me, and there's that same sad, almost smile, like he's decided to pass me one, but he knows I can't juggle either. Like there's no reason for both of us to bruise things any more than needed.
I hold out my hand. Let me help. — Victoria Schwab

We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure all your life. — John W. Gardner

Worry is spiritual nearsightedness, a fumbling way of looking at little things, and of magnifying their value. — Anna Robertson Brown Lindsay

Life direct ... is what Flaubert and Joyce have convinced themselves the man may never get quite clear of but the artist has nothing to do with. What they can't admit is that t is overrated: which artists, faking and fumbling it together out of spit and toothpicks, should know best of all. — Marvin Mudrick

He gave a halfhearted hope Ichiro could walk on his own steam, but a few fumbling tries to get him up onto his feet only showed Bobby how Ichi's legs could double as overcooked noodles. — Rhys Ford

Maggots in corpses. He'd seen. Whitely churning, in the mouths of dead soldiers, where their noses had been, their ears and blasted-away jaws. Most of the soldiers had been men as young as he himself had been. Italians fallen after the Austrian offensive of 1918. You do not forget such sights. You do not un-see such sights. He himself had been wounded, but he had not died. The distinction was profound. Between what lived and what died the distinction was profound. Yet it remained mysterious, elusive. You did not wish to speak of it. Especially you did not wish to pray about it, to beg God to spare you. For it disgusted him to think of God. It disgusted him to think of prayers to such a god. Fumbling his big, bare toe against the trigger of the shotgun he was damned if he would think, in his last quivering moment of his life, of God. — Joyce Carol Oates

The key, I would say to any fledgling humorist starting out, is to make sure that sloppiness is part of your recipe. That way they come to expect fumbling and clumsiness and they say, "Oh, it must be a charming part of his personality." — Nick Offerman

Because we imagine that we are what humanity was divinely destined to become, we assume that our prehistoric ancestors were trying to be us, but just lacked the tools and techniques to succeed. We invest our ancestors with our own predelictions in what seem to us primitive and unevolved forms. As an example of all this, we take it for granted that our religions represent humanity's ultimate and highest spiritual development and expect to find among our ancestors only crude, fumbling harbingers of these religions. We certainly don't expect to find robust, fully developed religions whose expressions are entirely different from ours. — Daniel Quinn

He has a light, fumbling brutality, which several times makes me think that this time it'll cost me my sanity. In our dawning, mutual intimacy, I induce him to open the little slit in the head of his penis so I can put my clitoris inside and fuck him. — Peter Hoeg

The rest are ruined. No fumbling drunk in my bed would top what I'd just felt. — Kalayna Price

Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. — H.G.Wells

They were all fitting into place, the jig-saw pieces. The odd strained shapes that I had tried to piece together with my fumbling fingers and they had never fitted. Frank's odd manner when I spoke about Rebecca. Beatrice and her rather diffident negative attitude. The silence that I had always taken for sympathy and regret was a silence born of shame and embarrassment. It seemed incredible to me now that I had never understood. I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great wall in front of them that hid the truth. This was what I had done. I had built up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth. Had I made one step forward out of my own shyness Maxim would have told these things four months, five months ago. — Daphne Du Maurier

Sure, but real life's not actually like that," Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. "You don't just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You're not going to be a character in a story, there's nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn't work like that. — Lev Grossman

On the fourth ring there's the sound of fumbling. Then Kent's voice, warm and reassuring: 'Hunky Heroes, rescuing distressed women, captive princesses, and girls without wheels since 1684. How can I help you? — Lauren Oliver

Do you believe in God, doctor?
No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original. — Albert Camus

What if that were true?
Was that so bad?
To have created love like that out of absolutely nothing - it was a sort of miracle, wasn't it? To have set that kind of example for their son - for Flash - for everyone who saw them fumbling along together, walking, talking, marveling at life. It was a kind of glory, if he thought about it, he realized. A common uncontested outright glory for mankind, he thought. Like each and every unnamed, uncontested, unsung star up there, coupling with the dark for us to contemplate in silence. — Marianne Wiggins

We have big plans. Oh yes. We're fumbling in the dark, but at least we're in motion. Everyone is working now; Julie and I are just pausing for a moment to enjoy the view, because it's a beautiful day. The sky is blue. The grass is green. The sun is warm on our skin. We smile, because this is how we save the world. We will not let Earth become a tomb, a mass grave spinning through space. We will exhume ourselves. We will fight the curse and break it. We will cry and bleed and lust and love, and we will cure death. We will be the cure. Because we want it. — Isaac Marion

For the Christian one dislocating, self-impoverishing hour spent with a child living in a broken-down dump is worth more than all the burial mounds of rhetoric, all the enfeebled good intentions, all the mumbling and fumbling and tardiness of those Christians who are so busy cultivating their own holiness that they cannot hear the anguished cry of the child in the slum. — Brennan Manning

We only make it about as far as the back curtain, sliding into the darkness near the bathrooms with a rush of breath and a few gasps. I drop Sydney to her feet and slam her into the wall with a groan, fumbling at her dress, pressing my erection against her firm body. She's just ... killer. Absolutely killer.
I don't know you, but I want to slam you into this wall and fuck the shit out of you. Explain. — C.M. Stunich

Connie could make her feel slow and bovine; the way she'd suddenly snap her head around and bark a question that would leave Margie fumbling for an answer. — Liane Moriarty

So-called real life has only once interfered with me, and it had been a far cry from what the words, lines, books had prepared me for. Fate had to do with blind seers, oracles, choruses announcing death, not with panting next to the refrigerator, fumbling with condoms, waiting in a Honda parked round the corner and surreptitious encounters in a Lisbon hotel. Only the written word exists, everything one must do oneself is without form, subject to contingency without rhyme or reason. It takes too long. And if it ends badly the metre isn't right, and there's no way to cross things out. — Cees Nooteboom

She had kept well behind the safety barrier her entire life, but now she was standing there at the edge of the precipice for the very first time, fumbling blindly with the realization that there were other ways to live, at how intense and rich life could be. — Katarina Bivald

He asked with a stiff smile 'What is love?'
For me,' said Orianda, fumbling for a definition, 'for me it is a compound of anticipation and gratitude. When either of these two ingredients is absent love is dead. — A.E. Coppard

How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then; and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joining, made. And now we touch each other with the tenderness of mortals, who know themselves — Wendell Berry

Perhaps creativity is fumbling that dance step, or driving the chisel the wrong way into the stone. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Here," Trey says, fumbling for his cell phone on the bedside table. "You should call me.
Ben turns and looks at him, a small smile still playing around his lips. "Oh, should I? What's your number?"
Trey tells him, and Ben enters it into is phone, and then he takes Trey's and enters his number. "Okay," Ben says a little cautiously, "well, we'd love to have you come for a meeting. Are you seriously considering U of C? Even after what happened?"
"Oh yeah. I totally am. "What's your name again?"
Ben laughs and tells him.
I frown. Trey knows U of C is a private school. Mucho big bucks. But hey ... there's always the power of morphine to make you forget about the minor details of your life, like living above a restaurant that struggles monthly to pay bills, and considering returning to the place where some lunatic outsider came in and fucking shot you because you're gay. — Lisa McMann

In her own fumbling way, she'd reminded him he was just a man, fallible, needful, a member of the supremely imperfect human race ... and shamefully undeserving of what she had to offer.
Looking at Billie, touching her, tasting her, had filled him with a wanting fiercer than any he'd known. For the first time, he was faced with something he couldn't truly have, because of what he'd become. — Shelby Reed

turning men into dribbling, fumbling jackasses and controlling the world and shit." "Controlling — Laekan Zea Kemp

My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands! — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hey,' Wildgirl says, 'let me into your backpack. I've got a light on my keys that I totally forgot about.'
I turn my back to her and feel her fumbling with the zip of my pack. It's a lot lighter now.
'I'm glad you hung on to your bag. I would have had to kick your ass if you lost all my stuff.'
I probably wouldn't mind that, although if I were given a choice, I'd opt for another kiss. It's the first time I've been so close to someone since I've changed. Kissing felt better than I remembered, but it also felt like it was something I had to be careful about. It never felt that way before. — Leanne Hall

The author of this text did not write to provoke, but merely to express a truth as he conceives it. Your own theologians have tied logic in knots to advance a doctrine addressing this very same point. What is the Virgin Birth, after all, but the fumbling of minds striving to deal with the indelicate realities of the body? We Jews are merely more forthright about such matters. — Geraldine Brooks

Be gentle and tolerant. Intimacy will grow, but will take time and cannot be rushed. If all goes well, soon you will become more familiar with each other, and handling will forge awkward fumbling and fondling into more satisfying and productive caresses and eventually into a comfortable working partnership. At this stage you will be ready to accompany your new camera into the world. — Bill Jay

We're fumbling in the dark, but at least we're in motion. — Isaac Marion

She leaned over the bed to plant a goodbye kiss on his cheek. Instead he reached up and cupped her head in his left hand, so that he was in charge of her kiss and it landed oh his lips. It was not, as she would have expected, the fumbling kiss of a boy unused to dating but the practiced kiss of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. — Lois Duncan

You cannot explain, with the limitations of language and inexperience, why your body can cause such a sudden, fumbling response in someone else, nor can you put into exact words what you feel about your body, explain the thrum it feels in proximity to another warm-skinned form. What you feel is a tangle of contradictions: power, pleasure, fear, shame, exultation, some strange wish to make noise. You cannot say how those things knit themselves together somewhere in the lower abdomen and pulse. — Marya Hornbacher

He who is capable of really reading a writer will have his every question answered by the works themselves. For example, Kafka depicts the dreams & visions of his lonely, difficult life and it is these dreams & visions alone that should preoccupy us & not the interpretations that sharp-witted critics can give these writings. Their interpreting is an intellectual sport, one that is good for clever people who can read & write books on African sculpture or 12-tone music but who never get to the heart of works of art because they stand at the gate fumbling with their 100 keys, blind to the fact that the gate is not really locked. — Hermann Hesse

His hand reached for his throat, fumbling for the small leather pouch he always wore about his neck. Inside he kept the bones of the four fingers his king had shortened for him, on the day he made Davos a knight. My luck. His shortened fingers patted at his chest, groping, finding nothing. The pouch was gone, and the fingerbones with them. Stannis could never understand why he'd kept the bones. "To remind me of my king's justice," he whispered through cracked lips. But now they were gone. — George R R Martin

I have begun to wonder where I came from. The person I am now, this fumbling, stumbling supplicant ... was I built on the foundations of my old life, or did I rise from the grave a blank state? How much of me is inherited, and how much is my own creation? Questions that were once just idle musings have begun to feel strangely urgent. Am I firmly rooted to what came before? Or can I choose to deviate? — Isaac Marion

I do not wear a welcome mat on my chest just so people can walk all over it fumbling with the keys to the locks they keep building for the doors I keep opening hoping someone will see the rainforest growing in my living room. — Andrea Gibson

He slid his hands to the back of her neck, fumbling for the necklace's clasp. He undid it and held the chain of rubies up, red and gold in the flickering candlelight. "No shackles for us," he said, "no matter how rich. — Susanna Fraser

I got better the way everyone gets better: by trial and error and error and error, by fumbling around and making mistakes but not giving up and working incredibly hard at it every day and eventually, through a painful and laborious process of eliminating every wrong turn, finding my way. — Mishka

I reached for a Coca-Cola.
"Want some?" I asked.
"I do not drink caffeine," he said.
"Wow, you make me look like a bad girl; that's hard to do."
He cracked a big smile for the first time I'd seen, and a huge dimple appeared in his right cheek. A butterfly wing flapped in my stomach. I turned my attention back to the drinks, fumbling a little for a cup.
"Don't let me pressure you," I said. "I was only kidding. We don't need you all hyped up on caffeine. How about ginger ale instead?"
"Is that drink not only for upset stomachs? — Wendy Higgins

Literally, people probably came up with a budget and said, 'It'll be cheaper if we cut down the prep,' but it's not cheaper, because then you're shooting, you're fumbling through the movie and you are prepping at three times the cost because you're quadruple-time as you're shooting and then prepping after you're done shooting. — Howard Berger

Now she had a fumbling knowledge that, had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him. — Margaret Mitchell

Tell me you want this too, baby doll."
"Want what?" I can't think, my head is heavy, my limbs fumbling.
His dark eyes meet mine. "Everything."
My finger shakes as I trace the dark line of his brow. His lids lower, his head tilting to follow my touch. I lean in, kiss the corner of his eye. "Only with you. — Kristen Callihan

I froze like a startled bunny. Fumbling the disk into my purse, I cut my eyes toward the hallway.

Had I locked the front door?

Of course I had. Only a moron would break into someone's house and forget to lock the door.

Damn it! I'd forgotten to lock the door. — Lois Greiman

But I'm not any better at relationships than you are. We'll find our way together, even if we're fumbling around in the dark for a while. — Christine Feehan

We can never understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light. — Lauren Oliver

Memphis cupped her cheek in his hand and put his mouth on hers. Theta had never been kissed the way Memphis was kissing her now. There had been fumbling boys thrumming with nervous want. There had been theater owners, older "uncles" who pawed at her when she walked past or who wanted to "inspect" her costume to make sure it was decent down to the undergarments, men she granted the occasional kiss in order to stave off something worse. And there was Roy, of course. Beautiful, cruel Roy, whose kisses were declaratory, as if he needed to conquer Theta, to brand her with his mouth. Those men had never really seen Theta. But Memphis's kiss was nothing like theirs. It was passionate, yet tender. A mutual agreement of desire. It was a kiss shared. He was kissing her. He was with her. — Libba Bray

He lives day-to-day now, just as we do, fumbling forward down the path to the future. — Robin Hobb

Our fumbling government's response since Beirut - during both Republican and Democratic administrations - has been to cut and run, or to flat ignore this growing threat, apparently hoping it would go away. — David Hackworth

Running a bit late meet at my place around 7?'
Smiling at the phone, my fingers fumbling over the keypad quickly,
'Yup-see you there!'
I deleted the exclamation mark and counted to thirty before I allowed myself to press send. — Jessica Shirvington

Bloody North," said Shev as she picked her way towards it and had a tentative drag at the ropes. "Even their bridges are shit."
"Their men are good," said Javre, clattering out with no fear whatsoever. "Far from subtle, but enthusiastic."
"Great," said Shev as she edged after, exchanging a mutually suspicious glance with a crow perched atop one of the posts. "Men. The one thing that interests me not at all."
"You should try them."
"I did. Once. Bloody useless. Like trying to have a conversation with someone who doesn't even speak your language, let alone understand the topic."
"Some are certainly more horizontally fluent than others."
"No. Just no. The hairiness, and the lumpiness, and the great big fumbling fingers and ... balls. I mean, balls. What's that about? That is one singularly unattractive piece of anatomy. That is just ... that is bad design, is what that is. — Joe Abercrombie

The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media
movies, Telstar, flight
far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage. — Marshall McLuhan

I stare down into her eyes, smoky and glistening in the light stealing through the window.

Eyes you can fall into and keep falling.

She isn't the mother of my son, she isn't my wife, we haven't made a life together, but I love her all the same, and not jsut the version of Daniela that exists in my head, in my history. I love the physical woman underneath me in this bed here and now, wherever this is, because it's the same arrangement of matter--same eyes, same voice, same smell, same taste...

It isn't married-people lovemaking that follows.

We have fumbling, groping, backseat-of-the-car, unprotected-because-who-gives-a-fuck, protons-smashing-together sex. — Blake Crouch

There in that embrace, she feels something
shuffling around, moving warily
fumbling through the dusty rooms of her heart,
and, one by one, turning on the lights — Toby Barlow

Sydney," Adrian interrupted, cupping my face in his hands. "Never, ever think like that. I don't
regret anything we've faced. Being with you is the best thing that's ever happened to me, the one
perfect decision I've made in a lifetime of fumbling and poor judgment. I'd go through it all again to
be by your side. Never doubt that. Never doubt how I feel about you."
"Oh, Adrian," I said, letting him wrap me in his arms, surprised at the bubble of emotion welling
up within me.
He held me tightly. "I love you. If anything, I can't believe you gave up everything you did to be
with me. You changed your whole life for me."
"My life didn't even begin until I met you," I told him fiercely. — Richelle Mead