Knowing When To Back Off Quotes & Sayings

Art is personal, originating from dreams, ideas, neuroses; art is shared, harkening back to the humans around the fire; art imbues pleasure and power by enabling people to know reality ... Art is a necessity because it is a way of knowing ... Is the need for truth physiological? Art exists out of time ... images may be different bu there is always a repetition- a thread. — Zelda Fichandler

Under the rules of colonialism, everything goes to and comes from the mother country. In 1870, the colony of Turks and Caicos was asked to send a crest to England so that a flag for the colony could be designed. A Turks and Caicos designer drew a crest that included Salt Cay saltworks with salt rakers in the foreground and piles of salt. Back in England, it was the era of Arctic exploration, and, not knowing where the Turks and Caicos was, the English designer assumed the little white domes were igloos. And so he drew doors on each one. And this scene of salt piles with doors remained the official crest of the colony for almost 100 years, until replaced in 1968 by a crest featuring a flamingo. — Mark Kurlansky

I'm trying to keep your safe!" Puck exploded, whirling on me. His eyes feverish, and I shrank back. "This isn't a game, Meghan! The shit is about to hit the fan, and you're right in the middle of it without knowing enough to duck! — Julie Kagawa

A long hug when you really need it Sometimes we all get rattled. When bad news surprises you, painful memories flash back, or heavy moments turn your stomach to mush, it's great to fall into a warm and comforting pair of big, wide open arms. Shaking with sobs, dripping with tears, you snort up your runny nose and smear snot across their shoulder as that hug relaxes you and comforts you and helps you get through everything, even for a minute, even for a moment. Maybe there are "It's going to be okay" whispers, some gentle back rubbing, or just the quiet silence of knowing that they're not going to let go until you let go first. As their steady arms support you, and the pain washes over you, the hug gives you a warm glow in a shivery moment. So when you eventually pull back, smile that classic "I'm sorry and thank you" smile, and swipe wet bangs off your forehead, you still might not feel great, but if you're lucky you'll feel a little more AWESOME! — Neil Pasricha

One of the experiences of prayer is that it seems that nothing happens. But when you start with it and look back over a long period of prayer, you suddenly realize that something has happened. What is most close, most intimate, most present, often cannot be experienced directly but only with a certain distance. When I think that I am only distracted, just wasting my time, something is happening too Immediate for knowing, understanding, and experiencing. Only in retrospect do I realize that something very important has taken place. — Henri Nouwen

I felt like looking at the season to this point, we probably hadn't taken enough shots downfield to loosen thing up, ... It does serve a purpose even if you don't hit it. There's nothing that will get a cornerback to back off a little bit than knowing he got beat even if you hit it or not. — Mark Richt

My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren't they? I know they didn't invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn't know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves. — Nick Hornby

The chopper made a wide circle and came back around, hovered for a few seconds over him and moved forward. Nothing. "Shit," he yelled. Knowing he'd fucked up. He was their eyes. He was supposed to see everything. Sweat — A.E. Via

(Arman speaking) ... I've always followed my heart, Ilauria, knowing it would one day lead me back to you. — Jasmine Angell

These girls come; they last one season; they're completely used up and dried out and sent back home. That's not how to make a life. I want a girl to come in knowing full well what she's getting into and being able to deal and make decisions that will create a career. — Carol Alt

Yes, it's true, what I said earlier: A real life doesn't mean geting what you want; the achievement, the privilege, too, is knowing what you love.But getting what you love? Having what you love love you back? Oh, my friend, it's miracle: your one tiny life's head-on collision with divinity. — Marisa De Los Santos

How many leaps did Nijinksy take before he made the one that startled the world? He took thousands and thousands and it is that legend that gives us the courage, the energy, and arrogance to go back into the studio knowing that while there is so little time to be born to the instant, you will work again among the many that you may once more be born as one. That is a dancer's world. — Martha Graham

How to identify love by knowing what it's not: love doesn't use a fist. Love never calls you fat or lazy or ugly. Love doesn't laugh at you in front of friends. It is not in Love's interest for your self-esteem to be low. Love is a helium-based emotion; Love always takes the high road. Love does not make you beg. Love does not make you deposit your paycheck into its bank account. Love certainly never, never, never brings the children into it. Love does not ask or even want you to change. But if you change, Love is as excited about this change as you are, if not more so. And if you go back to the way you were before you changed, Love will go back with you. Love does not maintain a list of your flaws and weaknesses. Love believes you. — Augusten Burroughs

Back therefore we find ourselves returning. Back to the wisdom of the plough; back to the wisdom of those who follow the sea. It is all a matter of the wheel coming full-circle. For the sophisticated system of mental reactions to which we finally give our adherence is only the intellectualised reproduction of what more happily constituted natures, without knowing what they possess, possess. Thus between true philosophers and the true simple people there is a magnetic understanding; whereas, the clever ones whose bastard culture only divorces them from the wisdom of the earth remain pilloried and paralysed on the prongs of their own conceit. — John Cowper Powys

As long as you are forced to be a woman first instead of a person, by default, you need to be a feminist. That's it. Men are people, women are women? Screw that. Screw that. I am sick of having words aimed to shut me up. I am sick of having to be anything other than a person first. Zounds! I enjoy being a girl, whatever that means. For me, that meant Star Wars figurines, mounds of books, skirts and flats. It meant Civil War reenacting and best girlfriends I'd give a kidney to and best guy friends I'd ruin a liver with and making messes and cleaning up some of them and still not knowing how to apply eye shadow. That's being a girl. That's being a person. It's the same damn thing. I wish Rush had just called me an idiot. I'm happy to be called an idiot! On the day when someone on the Internet calls me an idiot first and ugly second, I will set down my feminist battle flag and heave a great sigh. Then I will pick it back up and keep climbing. There are many more mountains to overcome. — Alexandra Petri

She's my wife. Back off, jarhead," he tossed back over his shoulder. Jared laughed, and it wasn't a mean laugh. Cassie bit back a grin as he stepped back, giving Mitch room to turn around before stepping right back into his personal space. His smile was knowing and totally awesome. "Actually, she's Cassie. She's nobody's wife, because the loser she was married to wasn't smart enough to know just how awesome his wife was when he had her. So if that's you, I'm sorry, bud. And I'm guessing it is, because only a moron who's never served in uniform would call someone a jarhead. You gotta be a Marine to use that term, and only to another Marine. You fail on both points, but try harder next time. — Cora Seton

There was no back home any more, not in the essential way, and that was part of Paris too. Why we couldn't stop drinking or talking or kissing the wrong people no matter what it ruined. Some of us had looked into the faces of the dead and tried not to remember anything in particular. Ernest was one of these. He often said he'd died in the war, just for a moment; that his soul had left his body like a silk handkerchief, slipping out and levitating over his chest. It had returned without being called back, and I often wondered if writing for him was a way of knowing his soul was there after all, back in its place. Of saying to himself, if not to anyone else, that he had seen what he'd seen and felt those terrible things and lived anyway. That he had died but wasn't dead any more. — Paula McLain

Loneliness isn't about being by yourself. That's fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. Loneliness is about finding a landing-place, or not, and knowing that, whatever you do, you can go back there. The opposite of loneliness isn't company, it's return. A place to return. — Jeanette Winterson

So what do you think?' He asked, holding up the book.
'I think Salinger is a closet paedophile,' I replied placidly and was surprised and comforted by this minuscule, acidic, bitter Sylvia Plath like mocking, sniping tone that had crept into my voice. 'The main character Seymour is a fully grown man and a pervert who befriends young girls with his storytelling and swimming, just to get close enough to groom them in preparation for the inevitable sexual assault he lusts after. You might have noticed for example in A Perfect Day For Bananafish he grabs the young girls-'
'Sybil.'
'He grabs Sybil's ankles while lying on the beach and again when he pushes her in the water,' I continued. 'He goes too far when he kisses the bottom of her foot which makes even a four-year-old yell out in fear, knowing a line had been crossed. Frustrated Seymour walks away and goes back to his hotel where he kills himself in shame. — J.D. Gallagher

Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself - that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word "doublethink" involved the use of doublethink. — George Orwell

When does God turn a want into a need? When you feel the same way almost every day. Your thoughts can be distracted for a short period of time, but your mind will always take you back to the one place that feels like home. — Shannon L. Alder

Lincoln found himself in a stifling courtroom one hot summer day, pleading his client's case. The opposing lawyer, in a concession to the oppressive heat, took off his coat and vest as the debate went on. The man's shirt had its buttons in the back, a style which was unusual even then. Lincoln looked at his opponent and sized up the man's apparel. Knowing that the rural jury disliked pretension of any kind, or any attempt to show superior social rank, he said: "Gentlemen of the jury, having justice on my side, I don't think you will be at all influenced by the gentleman's pretended knowledge of the law, when you see he does not even know which side of his shirt should be in front." The jury burst into laughter, and Lincoln won the case. — Rriiver Nyile

It worked! Holy shit, it worked! I just suited up and checked the lander. The high-gain antenna is angled directly at Earth! Pathfinder has no way of knowing where it is, so it has no way of knowing where Earth is. The only way for it to find out is getting a signal. They know I'm alive! I don't even know what to say. This was an insane plan and somehow it worked! I'm going to be talking to someone again. I spent three months as the loneliest man in history and it's finally over. Sure, I might not get rescued. But I won't be alone. The whole time I was recovering Pathfinder, I imagined what this moment would be like. I figured I'd jump up and down a bit, cheer, maybe flip off the ground (because this whole damn planet is my enemy), but that's not what happened. When I got back to the Hab and took off the EVA suit, I sat down in the dirt and cried. Bawled like a little kid for several minutes. I finally settled down to mild sniffling and then felt a deep calm. It was a good calm. — Andy Weir

It seems to me that fire leaves nothing behind at all - the ash really isn't part of the flame, it's part of the fuel. Fire changes it from one thing to another, drawing off its energy and turning it into . . . well, into more fire. Fire doesn't create anything new, it simply is. If other things must be destroyed in order for fire to exist, that's all right with fire. As far as fire is concerned, that's what those things are there for in the first place. When they're gone, the fire goes, too, and though you may find evidence of its passing you'll find nothing of the fire itself - no light, no heat, no tiny red fragments of cast-off flame. It disappears back to wherever it came from, and if it feels or remembers, we have no way of knowing if it feels or remembers us. — Dan Wells

Once in camp I put a log on a fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the center where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants. — Ernest Hemingway,

The man drew his foot back and kicked Mark in the ribs. Pain exploded in his side and he cried out, unable to help himself. The man kicked him again, this time in the back, right in the kidney. A deep ache washed through Mark, and tears stung his eyes as he cried out even louder. Alec protested. "Stop it, you sorry son of a - " His words were cut off when one of his captors reached down and punched him in the face. "Why are you doing this?" Mark yelled. "We're not demons! You people have lost your minds!" Another kick pierced him in the ribs, the pain unbearable. He balled up, wrapped his arms around himself. Prepared for the continued onslaught, knowing he had no chance of escape. "Stop." The word rumbled through the air from the other side of the fire, the deep, bellowing voice of a man. The men beating Mark and Alec immediately jumped back from them and knelt down, their faces lowered. — James Dashner

We are falling back into allegory," said the Captain, interrupting him. "If you mean by all that that the body is the most solid of realities, then say so."
"No, not exactly," Zeno explained. "This body, our kingdom, sometimes seems to me to be made of a fabric as loosely woven and as evanescent as a shadow. I should hardly be more astonished to see my mother again (who is dead) than to come upon you around a corner as I did, your face grown older and its substance recomposed more than once in twenty years' time, with its color altered by the seasons and its form somewhat changed, but your mouth still knowing my name. Think of the grain that has grown and the creatures that have lived and died in order to sustain that Henry who is and is not the one I knew twenty years ago. — Marguerite Yourcenar

By 1996 Nora Ephron was telling a graduating class at Wellesley, Don't underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. ... Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. — Rebecca Traister

You've seen a herd of goats
going down to the water.
The lame and dreamy goat
brings up the rear.
They are worried faces about that one,
but now they're laughing,
because look, as they return,
the goat is leading!
They are many different kind of knowing.
The lame goat's kind is a branch
that traces back to the roots of presence.
Learn from the lame goat,
and lead the herd back home. — Rumi

Anne?" said Dacy sitting up in bed and propping his chin on his hands, "Anne, where is sleep? People go to sleep every night, and of course I know it's a place where I do things I dream, but I want to know where it is and how to get there and back without knowing anything about it ... and in my nighty too. Where is it? — L.M. Montgomery

Ten years ago I saw a documentary on the siege of that Moscow theater. After just forty-eight hours of the terrorists confining the hostages to their seats with no sleep, the lights blazing and being forced to pee their pants-although if the had to shit, they could do so in the orchestra pit-well,more than a few hostages just stood up and walked to the exit knowing they'd get shot in the back. Because the were DONE. — Maria Semple

He had been the recipient, he now gratefully acknowledged, of a rare and precious gift. In demanding the hand of a woman he neither understood nor was capable of knowing, he had instead received from her the chance to see himself and the opportunity to become a better man. And he had changed. He knew he had. He knew that he was not that man stalking angrily back to his chambers in Rosings Hall. What had happened to him in those intervening months? He was not sure; he could offer no complete explanation, but the man who had opened Rosings's doors, already prepared to write an angry letter, was a stranger, a man who had been walking through his entire life asleep. But now, he had awoken. — Pamela Aidan

When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can't help feeling, we'd have known that Moby-Dick was a good book - -why, how could anyone help knowing?
But suppose someone says to us, "Well, you're here now: what's our own Moby-Dick? What's the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked?" What do we say then? — Randall Jarrell

But it is one thing to remember, another to know. Remembering is merely safeguarding something entrusted to the memory; knowing, however, means making everything your own; it means not depending upon the copy and not all the time glancing back at the master. — Seneca.

Rose was the one who knew the path, but these were the things Rose knew, and I wondered if maybe it was this knowing the back of things, the shortcuts, the forgotten stories, that gives you the right to call a place home. — Catherine Landis

And this prime hour of fragrance is the hour so many miss upon beds of sloth, never half knowing what a beautiful, marvellous world is around them. Not all the long hours of day can possibly bring back again the charm and blessedness of this, either to the body or to the soul. — Sarah Smiley

But my knowledge of Marxism was limited to knowing that Marx was a Jew, and that he had a long white beard. I said to Lunatcharsky (the political communist commissar for Education, 1918, fh) 'Whatever you do, don't ask me why I painted in blue or green, and why you can see a calf inside the cow's belly, etc. On the other hand you're welcome: if Marx is so wise, let him come back to life and explain it himself'. I showed him my canvases. — Marc Chagall

Too many years fighting back tears. Why can't the past just die? Wishing you were somehow here again, knowing we must say goodbye. Try to forgive, teach me to live, give me the strength to try! No more memories, no more silent tears, no more gazing across the wasted years. Help me say goodbye. — Charles Hart

Going through college a Red Sox fan and knowing the history behind everything that was going on back in the '80s and finally getting a chance to win a World Series for this great city and bringing it back after 86 years, it was truly special, and it's one of the highlights that I'll remember for a long time. — Tim Wakefield

Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black. Eleven — Jesmyn Ward

Ty tapped Nick's knee. "Do you really want him left behind knowing you did this? It can wait until we get back."
"Just stop talking, Beaumont," Nick grunted. "You're like the Bermuda Triangle of morals."
Zane snorted and covered it with a cough. — Abigail Roux

My heart seemed to drop down and back, the thing it always does right before I start to spin and spin. I refuse to call it a panic attack. Panic attacks are for nervous fliers, hipster neurotics. Their demons, whatever they are, can't even compare to the terror of knowing it's about to happen, the something bad I've been waiting for ever — Jessica Knoll

Oh, he'd be back all right! Giving her the last laugh before she moved out. And that was why she hadn't moved out yet. Just knowing she could, anytime she wanted to, made all the difference, of course. She'd just wait for him to succumb one more time, that was all. One more time
proving to him that he still wanted her before she disappeared out of his life for good. — Rosemary Rogers

Waiting for a hot pocket to cook we'd fuck and be satisfied, barefoot on new york city apartment linoleum. A satisfying hot pocket and a big ass smile and a tight ass grip and a wall beside a random pipe beside the stove where we left palm and dick prints. We fucked like this. Three condoms in an hour and a half and where are you now? Holding the hand of some local dude you wish was a little more international, wishing you had known I was enough and asked me to stay. You are standing in the kitchen waiting for popcorn to pop while he washes dishes, not knowing I'm wishing back for you. — Darnell Lamont Walker