Ill Wind Quotes & Sayings

I'm not fooled any more by an ill wind and a light that fails. — E.B. White

Lower case Ss are notoriously difficult to get right. But in Helvetica it's not straight - you want to go in there and tighten it up. And the 'a' looks so woolly and ill-conceived, it really winds me up. — Bruno Maag

There's nothing giggly about Heather usually. She's the opposite; hanging out with her is like sitting in an empty church. That's why I like her. She's quiet and serious and a thousand years old and seems like she can talk to the wind. — Jandy Nelson

And those fingers just keep on wagging until some gay teenager hangs himself because he can't fight the fucking tornado of hatred whirling around his head, and that ill wind keeps blowing, until over in Kenya, some man lifts a knife and cuts out a young girl's clitoris? It's all connected, Dale. — Eden Connor

Except wind stands as it never stood
It is an ill wind turns none to good. — Thomas Tusser

The oboe's a horn made of wood.
I'd play you a tune if I could,
But the reeds are a pain,
And the fingering's insane.
It's the ill wind that no one blows good. — Ogden Nash

An oboe is an ill-wind that nobody blows good. — Bennett Cerf

Kevin Reeves ... proving an ill wind blows nobody no good. — David Coleman

THOMAS TUSSER. 1523-1580. Moral Reflections on the Wind. Except wind stands as never it stood, It is an ill wind turns none to good. {95} — Various

Upon This Age, That Never Speaks Its Mind

Upon this age, that never speaks its mind,
This furtive age, this age endowed with power
To wake the moon with footsteps, fit an oar
Into the rowlocks of the wind, and find
What swims before his prow, what swirls behind -
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric; undefiled
Proceeds pure Science, and has her say; but still
Upon this world from the collective womb
Is spewed all day the red triumphant child. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I think you get mentally ill being homeless. Most of the bag ladies wind up mentally ill pretty quickly - what people would call paranoid - because they are in such danger. I don't know if it's really paranoia because they are in great danger. Terrible things happen to them, and they lose everything. How could they not become at the very least severely depressed? — Alix Kates Shulman

I was a reluctant convert, and I am by no means a zealot. But the evidence is compelling: to write off wind-power is either ill-informed or dishonest. — Jonathan Dimbleby

Tis an ill wind that blows no minds — Gregory Hill

Tragedy seems to bring out all varieties of unexpected qualities in people. It was as if some folks got dunked in plastic, vacuum-sealed like backpacking dinners, and could do nothing but sweat in their private hell. And others seemed to have just the opposite problem, as if disaster had dipped them in acid instead, stripping off the outside layer of skin that once protected them from the slings and arrows of other people's outrageous fortunes. For these sorts, just walking down the street in the wake of every stranger's ill wind became an agony, an aching slog through this man's fresh divorce and this woman's throat cancer. They were in hell, too, but it was everybody's hell, this big, shoreless, sloshing sea of toxic waste. — Lionel Shriver

It was only out on the cold street ... that Riley began to feel the full loss of his father. Poppa, he thought, Oh Poppa. He'd grieved him since Christmas when he first took ill ... but it was here now, an empty place where once had been Poppa. A quietness to replace Poppa's good voice. A gust of wind that said he was there, not on earth, but in the air. Riley knew he would not be the same man again, for Riley had been Poppa's son and was now only his survivor. — Lori Lansens

The weather isn't what you think it is. Not by a long shot.
Weather Warden Joanne Baldwin in Ill Wind — Rachel Caine

As far as I was concerned, the Depression was an ill wind that blew some good. If it hadn't occurred, my parents would have given me my college education. As it was, I had to scrabble for it. — Sargent Shriver

Great people are not affected by each puff of wind that blows ill.
Like great ships, they sail serenely on, in a calm sea or a great tempest. — George Washington

There is no small degree of malicious craft in fixing upon a season to give a mark of enmity and ill-will: a word
a look, which at one time would make no impression, at another time wounds the heart, and, like a shaft flying with the wind, pierces deep, which, with its own natural force, would scarce have reached the object aimed at. — Laurence Sterne

When sad she brings the thunder
And her tears, they bring the rain
When ill she feeds a poison
To us all to fell her pain
Her smiles they bring the sunshine
And the laughter and the wind
And the birds they go on singing
And the world is whole again.
"Smile, sweet Sunday," Wednesday whispered in her ear. "The birds need your love so they can lift their wings. — Alethea Kontis

I think what makes people ill a lot of the time is the belief that your thoughts are concrete and that you're responsible for your thoughts. Whereas actually - the way I see it - your thoughts are what the wind blows through your mind. — Thom Yorke

What I have learned from the year past is something about miracles
miracles of healing and answered prayer and unexpected happy endings. Each came quietly and simply, on tiptoe, so that I hardly knew it had occurred.
All this makes me realize that miracles are everyday things. Not only the sudden, great good fortune, wafting in on a new wind from the sky. They are almost routine, yet miracles just the same.
Every time something hard becomes easier; every time you adjust to a situation which, last week, you didn't know existed; every time a kindness falls as softly as the dew; or someone you love who was ill grows better; every time a blessing comes, not with trumpet and fanfare, but silently as night, you have witnessed a miracle. — Faith Baldwin

In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. There is a tendency to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

It's an ill wind that blows no good. — John Heywood

There's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. — John Darnielle

what wind blows you here? nit an ill wind, I hope — Charles Dickens

Automn ill and adored
You die when the hurricane blows in the roseries
When it has snowed
In the orchard trees

Poor automn
Dead in whiteness and riches
Of snow and ripe fruits
Deep in the sky
The sparrow hawks cry
Over the sprites with green hair dwarfs
Who've never been loved

Inthe far tree-lines
The stags are groaning

And how I love O season how I love your rumbling
The falling fruits that no one gathers
The wind in the forest that are tumbling
All their tears in automn leaf by leaf
The leaves
You press
A crowd
That flows
The life
That goes — Guillaume Apollinaire

The Ill Wind Promises"

When the oscillator hums, I'll hold your hand
When they come to get you, I'll pull you aside
When the engine purrs, I'll find the right words
When the music stops, your lips may have to part

When your baby's born, I'll carry his name
When your mother visits, I'll hide in your bed
When your husband comes by, I'll turn up the music
When the party's over, I'll hand you your handbag

When you kiss me, I'll stick a hand in your pocket
When your lover calls, I'll braid your hair
When they come to get you, I'll talk nonsense
When you're dead and gone, I'll smoke a cigarette — Ann Cotten

I'm pretty well. So's the family, and so's the boys, except for a sort of rash as is a running through the school, and rather puts 'em off their feed. But it's a ill wind as blows no good to nobody; that's what I always say when them lads has a wisitation. A wisitation, sir, is the lot of mortality. Mortality itself, sir, is a wisitation. The world is chock full of wisitations; and if a boy repines at a wisitation and makes you uncomfortable with his noise, he must have his head punched. That's going according to the Scripter, that is. — Charles Dickens

The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence; as never, surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life. — F Scott Fitzgerald