Hopelessly Quotes & Sayings

You know the moment after a child has fallen on its hands and can't decide whether it has hurt itself enough to cry or whether it would rather get on with playing? That was what I saw while they were checking him on the kerb, the child buried deep under the surface of that old man's face, hopelessly out of his depth, hopelessly uncertain. Because we never really grow up, do we? — Barney Norris

I many times thought peace had come,
When peace was far away;
As wrecked men deem they sight the land
At centre of the sea,
And struggle slacker, but to prove,
As hopelessly as I,
How many the fictitious shores
Before the harbor lie. — Emily Dickinson

But for me, if we're talking about romance, cassettes wipe the floor with MP3s. This has nothing to do with superstition, or nostalgia. MP3s buzz straight to your brain. That's part of what I love about them. But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy human bodies. The cassette is full of tape hiss and room tone; it's full of wasted space, unnecessary noise. Compared to the go-go-go rhythm of an MP3, mix tapes are hopelessly inefficient. You go back to a cassette the way a detective sits and pours drinks for the elderly motel clerk who tells stories about the old days
you know you might be somewhat bored, but there might be a clue in there somewhere. And if there isn't, what the hell? It's not a bad time. You know you will waste time. You plan on it. — Rob Sheffield

Where one is hopelessly undecided as to what to say, there (as Confucius would have said, if they had given him the opportunity) silence is golden. — Lewis Carroll

What politician ever thinks beyond 4 or 5 years? But such thinking is hopelessly inadequate for the big questions that involve the fabric of the world we live in — Simon Barnes

FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use. — Edsger Dijkstra

Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction. — Terence McKenna

I am not an irretrievable skeptic. I am not hopelessly prejudiced. I am perfectly willing to believe, and my mind is wide open; but I have, as yet, to be convinced. I am perfectly willing, but the evidence must be sane and conclusive. — Harry Houdini

The strong are strengthened by reverses; the trouble is that the true meaning of events scores next to nothing in the match we play with men. Appearances decide our gains or losses and the points are trumpery. And a mere semblance of defeat may hopelessly checkmate us. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Of course you always had that detached quality as if you were playing a game without much concern over whether you won or lost, and now that you've lost the game, not lost but just quit playing, you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated. — Tennessee Williams

What is it about her? he wondered hopelessly. What did she offer him that he couldn't find elsewhere? Why did he persist in seeking her out, thinking about her, wanting her, when she was exactly wrong for him in nearly every way? — Rebecca Coleman

They lived before the Christian age began. They paid no reverence, as was due to God. And in this number I myself am one. 40 For such deficiencies, no other crime, we all are lost yet only suffer harm through living in desire, but hopelessly. — Dante Alighieri

We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can't stand windmills at any price. — James Lovelock

I guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments. — Junot Diaz

I think one of the dirty little secrets that I try to reveal here is that Washington is not hopelessly divided. It's very interconnected. We're talking about people sort of feeding from the same insider trough, where if you are known as an insider, you are going to get paid and do very, very, very well. — Mark Leibovich

To produce a really good biological theory one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms lying beneath them, realizing that they are likely to be overlaid by other, secondary mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could only build on what was already there. — Francis Crick

One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing. — Richard Ford

I love the ZX Spectrum. I love it with the sort of wistful passion that can only take root in the heart of a hopelessly nostalgic nerd. It was my first computer love, my first games machine, my first gateway to a hobby that has somehow also been my living for over twenty years. I owe it all to that flat black biscuit, throbbing with 48k of raw power. — Dan Whitehead

The pain is stronger than ever. I've seen bit of lost Paradises and I know I'll be hopelessly tryng tu return even if it hurts. The deeper I swing into the regions of nothingness the further I'm thrown back into myself, each time more and more frightening depths below me, until my very being becomes dizzy. There are brief glimpses of clear sky, like falling out of a tree, so I have some idea where I'm going, but there is still too much clarity and straight order of things, I am getting always the same number somehow. So I vomit out broken bits of words and sintaxes of the countries I've passed through, broken limbs, slaughtered houses, geographies. My heart is poisoned, my brain left in shreds of horror and sadness. I've never let you down, world, but you did lousy things to me.
(from "As I was moving ahead occasionally I saw brief glimpses of beauty", 2000) — Jonas Mekas

You're hopelessly unemployed and helplessly overprivileged. — Mark William Lindberg

Washington has, with some justification, gained a reputation for being hopelessly mired in partisan gridlock. — Ted Cruz

Beliefs create reality — Melody Beattie

I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time. — W.S. Merwin

He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivisible and indissoluble.
The presence of the girl was pathetic (a few caresses and a lot of meaningless words), but her absolute absence was infinitely grand; when he imagined a girl buried in a field, he suddenly discovered the nobility of pain and the grandeur of love.
But it was not only the absolute but also bliss he was looking for in his dreams of death. — Milan Kundera

Wild inside; raging,
writhing - yes, "writhing" was the word, writhing with desire. But
outwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly - baa, baa, baa. — Aldous Huxley

I'm a Black Sheep hopelessly lost in a field of delicious Blue Grass. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Peter was lost. More than lost, really. Spectacularly, hopelessly, "tell the search party not to get their hopes up" lost. If there was a contest for getting lost being held at that moment, Peter wouldn't win because he wouldn't be able to find it. That's how lost he was. — Mark Hill

Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above. — W.E.B. Du Bois

The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact. — George Santayana

Now comes the picture of mass defeat, the most awesome spectacle of the war. It is in the bent bodies of old women who poke among ruins seeking some miserable object that will link their lives with the old days. It is in the shamed darting eyes of the defeated. It is in the faces of the little boys who regard our triumphant columns with fear and fascination. And above all it is in the thousands of beaten, dusty soldiers who stream along the roads towards the stockades. Their feet clump wearily, mechanically, hopelessly on the still endless road of war. They move as haggard, gray masses, in which the individual had neither life nor meaning. It is impossible to see in these men the quality that made them stand up and fight like demons out of hell a few shorts months ago. — Audie Murphy

Maybe we don't ever feel that sweetly untainted and wholly majestic kind of love that takes every longing captive because we are hopelessly entangled in the illogical fear that despite all of love's grand goodness, it might not be good enough to keep us safe. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

They are hopelessly vulgar. Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being 'bad' is a question for the metaphysicians. They are bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and for this short life that is quite enough. — Henry James

You predicted quick victory. Now it's going to get hopelessly complicated. Jesus, don't you know any better than that by now? — Jim Butcher

The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don't offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere. — George Monbiot

I just realized at some point that I was hopelessly in love with the theater. I fought it for a long time because I thought theater was for, you know, insufferable actors. — Ellen McLaughlin

I want to be the friend you fall hopelessly in love with. The one you take into your arms and into your bed and into the private world you keep trapped in your head. I want to be that kind of friend. The one who will memorize the things you say as well as the shape of your lips when you say them. I want to know every curve, every freckle, every shiver of your body.
I want to know where to touch you, I want to know how to touch you. I want to know convince you to design a smile just for me. Yes, I do want to be your friend. I want to be your best friend in the entire world. — Tahereh Mafi

If you know the music the moment the violin string begins to vibrate, then you know how to navigate through the forest of brambles and entanglements with freedom and ease. If, on the other hand, you think that with practice the forest of brambles and entanglements will altogether disappear, then right from the beginning you are hopelessly entangled and won't find your way. — John Daido Loori

he felt himself hopelessly outnumbered. — John Steinbeck

The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

THE City of Angels operated mostly on a grid pattern, with a few winding streets tossed in to fuck up a tourist trying to get from Hollywood to downtown. Adding to the confusion are three of the worst intersected freeways known to mankind. An innocent stranger to the molasses gridlock around the downtown exits could unsuspectingly take the wrong course among the five hundred options available amid the endless construction and find himself circling the area, hopelessly lost until he either ran out of gas or went mad from the hell he couldn't escape.
Bobby was dead certain many of the street people trudging through downtown muttering to themselves were actually motorists who finally abandoned their cars and set to walking the cement and steel desert until the end of their days. I wasn't all together certain he was wrong. — Rhys Ford

The language of freedom-fighting was so co-opted by the baby boomers in order to express their now-hopelessly compromised ideologies that no other generation could emulate it without a smirk. This has created an apathetic generation in the West, with young people no longer distinguishing between the old order and the new. — Romola Garai

I feel sorry for anyone that thinks they have a chance. I am hopelessly and completely in love with you. — Jamie McGuire

If alpha [the fine-structure constant] were bigger than it really is, we should not be able to distinguish matter from ether [the vacuum, nothingness], and our task to disentangle the natural laws would be hopelessly difficult. The fact however that alpha has just its value 1/137 is certainly no chance but itself a law of nature. It is clear that the explanation of this number must be the central problem of natural philosophy. — Max Born

And I'm hopelessly in love with him. — Rainbow Rowell

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-clung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. — Walter Benjamin

Life without hope is hopelessly difficult but at the end hope can so easily make fools of us all. — Henry Marsh

If you have ever been in a real tragic or sad situation, the words that come out are hopelessly inadequate and kind of cliched. — Erika Slezak

To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect. — Aldous Huxley

I find it inordinately hard to speak about my other brother. He is a mere shadow in the background of my richest and most detailed recollections. It is one of those lives that hopelessly claim a belated something
compassion, understanding, no matter what
which the mere recognition of such a want can neither replace nor redeem. — Vladimir Nabokov

Because I know where everything in this room is. All the books, the papers-and the moment they start cleaning, those things get hopelessly organized and tucked away, and I can never find them again. — Sarah J. Maas

Deep Throat stamped his foot. 'A conspiracy like this ... a conspiracy investigation ... the rope has to tighten slowly around everyone's neck. You build convincingly from the outer edges in, you get ten times the evidence you need against the Hunts and the Liddys. They feel hopelessly finished - they may not talk right away, but the grip is on them. Then you move up and do the same thing at the next level. If you shoot too high and miss, the everyone feels more secure. Lawyers work this way. I'm sure smart reporters must, too. You've put the investigation back months. It puts everyone on the defensive - editors, FBI agents, everybody has to go into a crouch after this.'
Woodward swallowed hard. He deserved the lecture.
Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward — Carl Bernstein

Honest, hopelessly romantic old-fashioned gentleman seeks lady friend who enjoys elegant dining, dancing and the slow bloom of affection. — Claire Cook

I can't count the times I have lagged seemingly hopelessly far behind, and nobody except myself thinks I can win. But I have pulled myself in from desperate [situations]. When you are behind there are two strategies - counter-attack or all men to the defences. I'm good at finding the right balance between those. — Magnus Carlsen

The whole city was a compass. How could anyone ever have gotten so hopelessly lost here? — James Sallis

There is nothing which an untrained mind shows itself more hopelessly incapable, than in drawing the proper general conclusions from its own experience. And even trained minds, when all their training is on a special subject, and does not extend to the general principles of induction, are only kept right when there are ready opportunities of verifying their inferences by facts. — John Stuart Mill

She was remembering what it was like when you broke up with someone. Conversations became so hopelessly tangled. You had to be polite and precise. You couldn't safely criticize anymore, because you didn't have the right. You'd lost your immunity. — Liane Moriarty

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve
hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve
not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us. — Joy Williams

Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for. — Julian Barnes

Agnostics are people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence. — Herbert Spencer

The Numerati too, are grappling with towering complexity. They're looking for patterns in data that describe something almost hopelessly complex: human life and behavior. The audacity of their mission is almost maddening. They're going to figure out who we're likely to vote for, who we want to work with, perhaps even who we're best suited to love, all from the statistical patterns of data? It's the height of presumption, and it leads to humbling disappointments. Like the trees growing in the forests of Minnesota, we confound those who try to categorize us, and we do it most of the time without even trying. Life is complex. — Stephen Baker

Vote. Even if they are all hopelessly inadequate, pick the least terrible one and vote. My mother fought hard to get you that vote. — Rowan Coleman

Sometimes my dream seems the stupidest thing in the world. Sometimes it is a secret treasure in my pocket — Anya Parrish

The good news that the just and gracious Creator of the universe has looked upon hopelessly sinful men and women and has sent his Son, Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, to bear his wrath against sin on the cross and to show his power over sin in the resurrection, so that everyone who turns from their sin and themselves and trusts in Jesus as Savior and Lord will be reconciled to God forever. — David Platt

On the face of things, we were hopelessly mismatched, but somehow we fit together perfectly. — Tiffany Baker

The same families married the same families until relationships were hopelessly entangled and the members of the community looked monotonously alike. — Harper Lee

When she was older, after ten or so, she could tell she was being useful, but as a small child she was tolerated (only just, she knew) by this whirlwind of efficiency that was her mother organizing a party. Still she insisted on arranging fruit on a dish, or disposing ashtrays around the house, while her mother reduced her pace to Alice's. At least while "helping," Alice did not feel quite so much as if she were a tiny creature on top of a great wave, frantically and hopelessly signalling to her mother, who stood indifferently on the shore, not noticing her. — Doris Lessing

Weightless and endless. Timeless and restless. Hopelessly breathless — Amy Harmon

How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. — Julian Barnes

And now he could not marry Lady Lankouwen or Rainhilda or this beautiful maiden in front of him. Because he was in love ... desperately, hopelessly, painfully in love ... with the duke's daughter. — Melanie Dickerson

For there is not a single human being, not even the primitive Negro, not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands. — Hermann Hesse

I miss you terribly. You see, you always talk about getting cure of our romance, and I did my best to help! But now you have me definitely and hopelessly 'contaminated' to the extent that I am sick at heart. Strangeley, I do not want to be cured! I love you completely. — Leslie Maitland

It begins to look as though modern man cannot find his heroism in everyday life any more, as men did in traditional societies just by doing their daily duty of raising children, working, and worshiping. He needs revolutions and wars and "continuing" revolutions to last when the revolutions and wars end. That is the price modern man pays for the eclipse of the sacred dimension. When he dethroned the ideas of soul and God he was thrown back hopelessly on his own resources, on himself and those few around him. Even lovers and families trap and disillusion us because they are not substitutes for absolute transcendence. We might say that they are poor illusions in the sense that we have been discussing. — Ernest Becker

Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the
sane; thank You for letting me know what this is
like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening
blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without
terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly
lost
with this love — Franz Wright

I admit that I am hopelessly hooked on the printed newspaper. I love turning the pages and the serendipity of stumbling across a piece of irresistible information or a photograph that I wasn't necessarily intending to read. — Jill Abramson

That morning I realized I would probably spend the rest of my professional life trying to unravel the mysteries of trauma. How do horrific experiences cause people to become hopelessly stuck in the past? What happens in people's minds and brains that keeps them frozen, trapped in a place they desperately wish to escape? Why — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

How can I possibly say good-bye to the person I am so hopelessly, deeply and permanently in love with? Because I love you Chris. I do. I will always be in love with you, even though you'll never love me back. You have been my sanctuary this year. You saved me. Do you know that? You saved me. And I wish that you would let me save you. — Jessica Park

they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable? "Of — Aldous Huxley

In newsreels or news-photos, the Arab is always shown in large numbers. No individuality, no personal characteristics or experiences. Most of the pictures represent mass rage and misery, or irrational (hence hopelessly eccentric) gestures. Lurking behind all of these images is the menace of jihad. Consequence: a fear that the Muslims (or Arabs) will take over the world. — Edward W. Said

I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren. — Twyla Tharp

I'm hopelessly in love with him. — Rainbow Rowell

Writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have imagined the sort of scientific utopia which is coming to pass, but already their nightmare fancies are hopelessly out of date. A vast, air-conditioned, neon-lighted, glass-and-chromium broiler-house begins to take shape, in which geneticists select the best stocks to fertilise, and watch over the developing embryo to ensure that all possibilities of error and distortion are eliminated. — Malcolm Muggeridge

If they're beautiful I don't much mind if they're not true. It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as to your sense of the aesthetic. I wanted Betty to become a Roman Catholic, I should have liked to see her converted in a crown of paper flowers, but she's hopelessly Protestant. Besides, religion is a matter of temperament; you will believe anything if you have the religious turn of mind, and if you haven't it doesn't matter what beliefs were instilled into you, you will grow out of them. Perhaps religion is the best school of morality. It is like one of those drugs you gentlemen use in medicine which carries another in solution: it is of no efficacy in itself, but enables the other to be absorbed. You take your morality because it is combined with religion; you lose the religion and the morality stays behind. A man is more likely to be a good man if he has learned goodness through the love of God than through a perusal of Herbert Spencer." This — William Somerset Maugham

For ages happiness has been represented as a huge precious stone, impossible to find, which people seek for hopelessly. It is not so; happiness is a mosaic, composed of a thousand little stones, which separately and of themselves have little value, but which united with art form a graceful design. — Delphine De Girardin

I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer. — John Muir

What are the lessons to be learned from this journey of the mind? That humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos.
Have a nice day. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

All year long Sylvia had been trying to overthrow her guileless, college girl image. She knew "cottons with big full skirts and university personalities" would have looked hopelessly naive in New York. Sylvia wanted to be hard and urban. — Elizabeth Winder

Well, what? Sophie-"
"I hit her on the head with a mirror," Sophie said hopelessly. "One of those silver-backed ones, so it was quite heavy. She went down just like a stone, miss. So I ... I tied her to the bed and I came looking for you. — Cassandra Clare

People of the world, the time for decision is short. It is measured in a few years. The choice is ours as to whether or not we will pay the price of peace. If we are not willing to pay it, all that we hold dear will be consumed in the flame of war. The darkness in our world today is due to the disintegration of things which are contrary to God's laws. Let us never say hopelessly this is the darkness before a storm; rather let us say with faith this is the darkness before the dawn of the golden age of peace, which we cannot now even imagine. For this, let us hope and work and pray. — Peace Pilgrim

When I arrived in America, I experienced serious culture shock. For someone with a religious upbringing, the 1960s were an extremely difficult time. Even though religion was a big part of the civil rights and peace movements, in my college religion was treated as irrelevant, hopelessly stodgy, and behind the times. — Feisal Abdul Rauf

There on the hot white roof of humanity's last outpost, we look out over our rapidly, hopelessly, irretrievably changing world, and we sing: Nothing's gonna change my world. Nothing's gonna change my world. — Isaac Marion

Sophie." He said her name softly. If her life depended on it, she could not have looked anywhere but into the flat, silver depths of his eyes. She didn't think it was possible to be more aware of him than she already was, but the next moment proved her wrong. "Darling. I must turn down your offer. I am as astonished as you. But this is a subject upon which I've had months to think.
You're intelligent. You suspected my first offer of marriage was based upon my conviction that you would never consent to an affair with me and that it was desperation only for your person
that drove me to offer for you."
"And the second upon a need to rescue me."
He nodded. "Far more straightforward, darling, yet hopelessly complex."
She ignored the shiver in her belly. "Meaning?"
"I love you." He reached for the wine and filled the two glasses, though he left them on the table.
"I've become like you. A hopeless fool who cannot break his vows. And I did make vows to you today. — Carolyn Jewel

Time had past indeed: it had overtaken him and gone ahead. It had left him hopelessly behind with a few poor gifts: the iron grey hair, the heavy fatigue of the tanned face, two scars, a pair of tarnished shoulderstraps; one of those steady, reliable men who are the raw material of great reputations, one of those unaccounted lives that are buried without drums and trumpets under the foundations of monumental success. — Joseph Conrad

I don't think that you should tell me that you love me wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly. Hopelessly doesn't seem to make much sense, does it? — Oscar Wilde

Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content. — Robert Smithson

In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered to him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed. — Edward Bernays

If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, then a family is more like a rope. We're lots of fragile little strands, and we survive by becoming hopelessly intertwined with each other. — Brian K. Vaughan

I had never been good with words. On the path from my heart to my brain to my mouth, phrases became twisted and hopelessly convoluted. The intent - what I meant to say - never quite made it out. — Gabrielle Zevin

There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair. — Herman Melville

I was always of the
mindset that whatever will be, will be. We can only just try to control our
own lives, that because our lives are so hopelessly entangled in the
choices of others, we can never have full control over our destiny or fate
or purpose or whatever you want to call it. The choices we make define
us, of course, but so do the choices of everyone around us whether we
know them or not. Instead of contemplating what-if scenarios, I always
just tried to accept things. — David Bowick

The sight made her ache. How can I not touch you? she thought hopelessly, and then she was doing it, her fingers on his wrist. He didn't jump or even look at her, just stopped writing. Neither one of them moved, nothing moved, and the whole thing lasted three or four seconds at most, but when Pen took her hand away and started to breathe again, her chest hurt, as though she had been holding her breath for a very long time. — Marisa De Los Santos