Having One Of Them Days Quotes & Sayings

Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life. The threat of being outdoors surfaced frequently in those days. Every possibility of excess was curtailed with it. If somebody ate too much, he could end up outdoors. If somebody used too much coal, he could end up outdoors. People could gamble themselves outdoors, drink themselves outdoors. Sometimes mothers put their sons outdoors, and when that happened, regardless of what the son had done, all sympathy was with him. He was outdoors, and his own flesh had done it. To be put outdoors by a landlord was one thing - unfortunate, but an aspect of life over which you had no control, since you could not control your income. But to be slack enough to put oneself outdoors, or heartless enough to put one's own kin outdoors - that was criminal. — Toni Morrison

In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could
a look, a whisper, a moan
to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all. — Khaled Hosseini

I should have been conceived during Woodstock; it's in my blood: that burning desire to turn an absolute on its head and see what's underneath. I'm as random as I can be and as responsible as I should be. Attempting to fuse the two makes for interesting days. — Chila Woychik

The thing to keep in mind is that we're still in the very early days when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Saying there's a silence is a bit like if Columbus, looking to discover a new continent, only sailed 10 miles off the coast of Spain before turning back to say, 'Nothing out there!' — Seth Shostak

When you meet that person. a person. one of your soulmates. let the connection. relationship be what it is. it may be five mins. five hours. five days. five months. five years. a lifetime. let it manifest itself, the way it is meant to. it has an organic destiny. this way if it stays or if it leaves, you will be softer from having been loved this authentically. souls come into, return, open, and sweep through your life for a myriad of reasons, let them be who and what they are meant. — Nayyirah Waheed

So I only say, "So what should we do with our last few days?"
"I just want to spend every possible minute of the rest of my life with you," Peeta replies. — Suzanne Collins

Oh, yesterday, that one, we all cry out. Oh, that one! How rich and possible everything was! How ripe, ready, lavish, and filled with excitement
how hopeful we were on those summer days, under the clean, white racing clouds. Oh, yesterday! — Mary Oliver

In his Dialogue "Timaeus" Plato had a demiurge to create the globe-shaped world according to musical laws, including the human soul. Fifteen hundred years later, that still found an echo in the Renaissance. And in those days the architects realized that the musical harmonies had spatial expressions
namely, the relationships of the length of strings, and spatial relationships were precisely their only concerns. Because both the world and the body and soul were composed according to musical harmonies by the demiurge architect, both the macrocosm and the microcosm, they must therefore be guided in their own architectural designs by the laws of music. — Harry Mulisch

Even now, she wished she could write a note, push it across the table, and go away to her room. But she was no longer a Second Assistant Librarian of the Great Library of the Clayr. Those days were gone, vanished with everything else that had defined her previous existence and identity. — Garth Nix

Safe Sex
If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident
they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;
if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire
only the tribute of another's cry; if they employ each other
as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel
then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,
no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,
no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated
apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond's edge — Donald Hall

When they killed him, Mother wouldn't hold her peace, so they slit her throat. I was stupid then, being only nine, and I fought to save them both. But the thorns held me tight. I've learned to appreciate thorns since. The thorns taught me the game. They let me understand what all those grim and serious men who've fought the Hundred War have yet to learn. You can only win the game when you understand that it IS a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him loose them all. — Mark Lawrence

After a seven days' march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foilage.
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence. — Italo Calvino

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway. — Henry James

He'd captured her a couple of days ago. It was fitting that she capture him right back. — Erin Kellison

Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world. — Ada Louise Huxtable

During the early days of HootSuite, when social media was still seen as a fad, I made the decision to treat our funding as if it were my personal bank account. That's not to say I blew it on fast cars and fancy dinners. Exactly the opposite. — Ryan Holmes

Any film I do is not going to change the way black women have been portrayed, or black people have been portrayed, in cinema since the days of D.W. Griffith. — Spike Lee

Miss my daily Mass, and have a superstitious feeling that anything may happen on the days I don't go. However, nothing in particular has. — Rose Macaulay

When the two men finally appeared in the dining hall after having washed and changed from the journey, Daisy's heart pounded too fast to allow for a full breath.
Matthew's glance swept the company at large, and he bowed as Westcliff did. Both of them appeared collected and remarkably fresh. One would think they had been absent for seven minutes instead of seven days.
Before going to his place at the head of the table, Westcliff went to Lillian. Since the earl was never given to public demonstrations, it astonished everyone, including Lillian, when he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her full on the mouth. She flushed and said something about the vicar being there, making Westcliff laugh. — Lisa Kleypas

The library would've cheered me up, most days. I loved the heavy oaken tables, the high walls stacked with books to the ceiling, the musty smell of old pages and the heavy brass fixtures that had gone dark with age and wear. — Claudia Gray

At home in Moscow everything was in its winter routine; the stoves were heated, and in the morning it was still dark when the children were having breakfast and getting ready for school, and the nurse would light the lamp for a short time. The frosts had begun already. When the first snow has fallen, on the first day of sledge-driving it is pleasant to see the white earth, the white roofs, to draw soft, delicious breath, and the season brings back the days of one's youth. The old limes and birches, white with hoar-frost, have a good-natured expression; they are nearer to one's heart than cypresses and palms, and near them one doesn't want to be thinking of the sea and the mountains. — Anton Chekhov

Hundreds of people began to care in a personal way about the suffering of farm workers because they care about you and learned that you were willing to go to jail with striking farm workers," Chris wrote the delegates from the Jesuit spirituality conference. He apologized profusely for having misled them into thinking they would be out in a few days. But no one complained. They told Chris the two weeks ranked among the most moving times of their lives. The gripes came from those who had opted for the picket line that obeyed the injunctions. They had been forced to make the decision too fast, they grumbled to Chris.

Chris saw the saga as a modern parable, and he loved to tell the story: The people who played it safe, unwilling to risk arrest, ended up feeling cheated and angry. Those willing to sacrifice emerged from the ordeal enriched, certain that the experience had changed their lives. — Miriam Pawel

I remember watching an old Dracula movie once with Alphonse and having him laugh himself sick at the sight of a vamp only a few days out of the grave supposedly raising another one.He'd been impossible for weeks afterwards,mercilessly teasing all the weaker vamps in court about the three-day-old baby that was more powerful than them. — Karen Chance

Instead of the calendrical terms Monday, Tuesday and so forth, we cheerfully offer the following surrogates. Use them freely and often, for their use honors us all. For Sunday, please use Sunshine. For Monday. pleasy use Monty. For Tuesday, please use Toes. For Wednesday, please use Wetty. For Thursday, please use Thurby. For Friday, please use Fribs. For Saturday, please use Satto-gatto. — Mark Dunn

I had great femme mentors, I had good role models of gentle men, I found ways to be a butch that did not require being an ass in public, ways of masculinity that were not misogyny - which is what I see more often than I used to these days, this way of butches distancing themselves from any and all things feminine by embodying the worst excesses of men, from relatively harmless ones like spitting on the street and wearing too much cheap cologne to behaving as though women were an entirely separate species of second-class citizen, the objects of jokes and derision. — S. Bear Bergman

I can't lie to you and tell you that standing in front of someone and offering them your soul and having them reject you is not gonna be one of the worst things that ever happens to you. You will wonder for days or weeks or months or years afterward what it is about you that was so wrong or broken or ugly that they couldn't love you the way you loved them. You will look for all the reasons inside yourself that they didn't want you and you will find a million.
Maybe it was the way you looked in the mornings when you first woke up and hadn't showered. Maybe it was the way you were too available, because despite what everyone says, playing hard to get is still attractive.
Some days you will believe that every atom of your being is defective somehow. What you need to remember, as I remembered as I watched Grace Town leave, is that you are extraordinary. — Krystal Sutherland

Zombies have got to do a lot of hanging around together
weaklings, liars, cheaters. Everybody respects them these days, everybody thinks that if they don't respect them it means they're against civil liberties or something, but I can only sympathize with them a little, but only a little; I can't respect them, they bore me
their everlasting bawling about their tricky little sadnesses and deprivations of childhood bore me. You've introduced me to some of the people you know. I don't dislike any of them, but I really can't pretend I believe in any of them, or that they don't bore me. And in being critical of them of course I'm being critical of you, too, at least for having them as friends. There are other people around, too, you know, not just the ones who start by giving up, and then just hang around to see what giving up leads to. It leads to being a zombie of one sort or another. — William, Saroyan

Once you are ready to truly devote your days and times to what your soul came here to do, you will find your life unimaginably enriched. — Neale Donald Walsch

All right. Talk to me darlin'. You're not insane. A little crazy, but not insane. And this ... everything you've gotten ... in the last few days ... do you know how many people would kill for this?"
"But ... — Shelly Laurenston

Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences' having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature
as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance. — Annie Dillard

L. Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at the time. Five days after the sickening event at Wounded Knee, on January 3, 1891, he wrote, "The Pioneer [sic] has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

I don't have too many bad days because I just don't let them happen. When I'm having one of those days, I'll just be like. 'I'm not going to let this be a bad day,' and I'll do everything I can to turn it around. — Matt Dallas

I'm having one of those rare days where I love people and all of the amazing wonder they're capable of and if someone fucks that up for me I will stab them right in the face. — Jenny Lawson

I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms, them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready. — Wendell Berry

Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of normal," said Allen Frances. "That boundary is very populous. The most crowded boundary is the boundary with normal."
"Why?" I asked.
"There's a societal push for conformity in all ways," he said. "There's less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. 'Previously I was laughed at, I was picked on, no one liked me, but now I can talk to fellow bipolar sufferers on the Internet and no longer feel alone.'" He paused. "In the old days some of them may have been given a more stigmatizing label like conduct disorder or personality disorder or oppositional defiant disorder. Childhood bipolar takes the edge of guilt away from parents that maybe they created an oppositional child. — Jon Ronson

At least you can say you were in on the last days of Morocco," he told her. "How's your tea? Finished? I think we ought to be going. — Paul Bowles

The Old Days, the Lost Days
in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened to those certain songs. — Beryl Markham

What very mysterious things days were. Sometimes they fly by, and other times they seem to last forever, yet they are all exactly twenty-four hours. There's quite a lot we don't know about them. — Melanie Benjamin

Beyond the curve of the days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity - happiness was human, eternity ordinary. What mattered was to humble himself, to organize his heart to match the rhythm of the days instead of submitting their rhythm to the curve of human hopes. — Albert Camus

To give an extra dimension to the scolding she gave me: The word "twerp" was freshly coined in those days, and had a specific definition - it was a person, if I may be forgiven, who bit the bubbles of his own farts in a bathtub. — Kurt Vonnegut

When he pulled away, he smiled kindly at me. I felt so good, I'll admit I teared up a little. I guess until that moment I hadn't allowed myself to realize just how terrified I had been the last few days.
"Dad-"
"Shhh," he said. "No hero is above fear, Percy. And you have risen above every hero. Not even Hercules- — Rick Riordan

The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death. That first night, before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river. The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past ... and sometimes this journey will carry it so far for so long that it will forget to come back. — Tea Obreht

The law serves of nought else in these days but for to do wrong, for nothing is spread almost but false matters by color of the law for reward, dread and favor and so no remedy is had in the Court of Equity in any way. — Jack Cade

I bled a lot. I got hit across the face. We couldn't film for seven days. I got hit, whacked, underwater, across the face. I finished the shot, got into the boat and blood started coming out. — Steve Irwin

Every man, woman and child consumes, on average, 43 teaspoons of sugar a day. In 13 days, that adds up to a five-pound bag of sugar. — John Mackey

What are the unreal things, but the passions that once burned one like fire? What are the incredible things, but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things? The things that one has done oneself. No, Ernest; life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet- master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train. We come across some noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place, and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed. — Oscar Wilde

For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world. — Helen Vendler

Adoption is a global issue these days - it's certainly current - and it's encouraging for a lot of couples whether they're straight or gay. — Sara Ramirez

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet
Age: five thousand three hundred days. — Vladimir Nabokov

Whenever it shows itself - hope, that is - hands from the crowded streets reach for it with such violent urgency because of the fear that they may never see it again. They do so without knowing that their desperation frightens hope away. Hope also doesn't know that it is its scarcity. that causes the crowd to lunge at it, shredding its robe. And as it struggles to escape, the fabric scraps land in the hands of some but last only for hours, a day, days, a week, weeks, depending on how much fabric each hand is able to catch. — Ishmael Beah

I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible; to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance, to live so that which came to me as seed goes to the next as blossom, and that which came to me as blossom, goes on as fruit. — Dawna Markova

She wears those old fashioned pj's like body armour. Going to bed these days is like wresting with Kevlar. — Poppet

I was born out of a Vegas marriage: My parents got married three days after they met. — Elle King

I don't miss my pin-up days. I'm far too old for that malarkey. — Gail Porter

In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods are everywhere — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Wolsey sits with his elbows on his desk, his fingers dabbing his closed lids. He takes a great breath, and begins to talk: he begins to talk about England. You can't know Albion, he says, unless you can go back before Albion was thought of. You must go back before Caesar's legions, to the days when the bones of giant animals and men lay on the ground where one day London would be built. You must go back to the New Troy, the New Jerusalem, and the sins and crimes of the kings who rode under the tattered banners of Arthur and who married women who came out of the sea or hatched out of eggs, women with scales and fins and feathers; beside which, he says, the match with Anne looks less unusual. These are old stories, he says, but some people, let us remember, do believe them. — Hilary Mantel

Question: how can one manage not to lose time? Answer: experience it at its full length. Means: spend days in the dentist's waiting room on an uncomfortable chair; live on one's balcony on a Sunday afternoon; listen to lectures in a language that one does not understand, choose the most roundabout and least convenient routes on the railway (and, naturally, travel standing up); queue at the box-office for theatres and so on and not take one's seat; etc. — Albert Camus

Every couple of days I have to remind myself that I'm really okay. And it's not the pretend kind of okay. It's the kind that you feel from the inside out. It's the kind of okay that has me thinking about outfits and coffee first thing in the morning, and homework that's due later this week, and that I need to call Jodi back, and what Cole's abs look like when he flexes. It's the kind of okay that makes life a zillion times more bearable and also has me waiting for the other shoe to drop. I — Autumn Doughton