Life Clumsy Quotes & Sayings

Yes, it struck her now that this whole business of the bull was like a life; the important birth, the fair chance, the tentative, then assured, then half-dispairing circulations of the ring, an obstacle negotiated - a feat improperly recognized - boredom, resignation, collapse: then another, more convulsive birth, a new start; the circumspect endeavours to obtain one's bearings in a world now frankly hostile, the apparent but deceptive encouragement of one's judges, half of whom were asleep, the swervings into the beginnings of disaster because of that same negligible obstacle one had surely taken before at a stride, the final enmeshment in the toils of enemies one was never quite certain weren't friends more clumsy than actively ill-disposed, followed by disaster, capitulation, disintegration. — Malcolm Lowry

So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I can do everything with ease on the stage, whereas in real life I feel too big and clumsy. So I didn't choose acting. It chose me. — Ingrid Bergman

Earth life is giant field day where we willingly choose the limitation of racing with both feet in a potato sack, or sometimes we join up with another and agree to the limitation of racing as a team where each person has one leg tied to the leg of the other ... Agreeing to run a race with limitations or live a life with limitations doesn't mean you're slow, clumsy, or unenlightened. It just means you're showing up on field day, participating, and if you're really good, you try your best despite the obstacles. — Kaya McLaren

Would that my hands were meant to build. I would know what to say. What to do. Maybe in another life I would have been that man. In this one, my words, like my hands, are clumsy. All they can do is cut. All they can do is break. — Pierce Brown

And it's still unclear to me why a person has abilities that they do not want to have, why a person feels things that person doesn't want to feel and why that person doesn't feel things that person does want to feel, and why a person falls out of love when being in love was such a good thing to be in, and why a person makes loud and clumsy attempts at midnight to kill the life one could reasonably expect that person to want to preserve. — Catherine Lacey

I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day-
Mandella - wake up, goddammit, your shift! — Joe Haldeman

The day the roles reverse is foreign. It's a clumsy dance of love and responsibility, not wanting to cross any lines of respect. It's honoring this person who gave their life to you - not to mention literally gave you life - and taking their fragile body in your hands like a newborn, tending to their every need. — Lisa Goich

But at the same time, in reality, what a difference there is between the world today, and what it used to be! And with the passage of more time, some two or three hundred years, say, people will look back at our own times with horror, or with sneering laughter, because all of our present day life will appear so clumsy, and burdensome, extraordinarily inept and strange. Yes, certainly, what a life it will be then, what a life! — Anton Chekhov

Also there were people going round in such clumsy ways, stopping and starting, and hordes of schoolchildren like the ones I used to keep in order. Why so many of them and so idiotic with their yelps and yells and the redundancy, the sheer un-necessity of their existence, Everywhere an insult in your face. As the shops and their signs were an insult, and the noise of the cars with their stops and starts. Everywhere the proclaiming, this is life. As if we needed, more of life. — Alice Munro

When I feel clumsy or lost, I remind myself that nature, including me, was created by a a far wiser mind than mine. There is something in the cosmos - God, Spirit, Consciousness, Life Itself, call It what you will - that created and orchestrates nature, and did a pretty good job of it. Nature might just know what It's doing. Even when I don't. — Jeffrey R. Anderson

You've spent two years at the same school as Mina, hardly talking to her, never even realizing she is alive. Then she goes and does something crazy, against my wishes. She placed her own life in danger to save yours." Her face became very still. "Now, because of those actions, our whole family has to live with the consequences. You now feel obligated to help her, like she did you. I get that, I really do. But what gives you the right to question our actions and lifestyle?" Silence filled the kitchen. Mina held her breath, afraid to move. Brody straightened in his seat and swallowed slowly. Sara brushed her hands over her forehead in defeat. "You're enamored. That's it. In another week or so, you will wake up, and this will all be a dream. You will forget that Mina ever even saved your life. She will go back to being my clumsy, forgotten, outcast teen daughter, and you will go back to ruling the school and dating the head cheerleader. — Chanda Hahn

Case in point: Byrdie, the son growing effortlessly into lifelong boyhood. Still a schoolboy, soon to be an old boy, blithely accepting accidents as privileges - for instance, his natural immunity to HIV. (Byrdie liked studious, upper-class females. They were not exactly high risk.) Byrdie was the phoenix edition of Lee, adapted to the novel environment, and Lee was a useless relic. He had positioned himself all his life as a rebel against a hegemonic order no one was interested in questioning anymore. It had lost its power to crush and all its clumsy weapons that inspired active fear. Its dominance was equal, but separate. — Nell Zink

Everyday for Lucy's entire dog life Jane had sliced a banana for breakfast and had miraculously dropped one of the perfect disks on to the floor where it sat for an instant before being gobbled up. Every morning Lucy's prayers were answered, confirming her belief that God was old and clumsy and smelt like roses and lived in the kitchen.
But no more.
Lucy knew her God was dead. And she now knew the miracle wasn't the banana, it was the hand that offered the banana. — Louise Penny

He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ... — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Language to me is a tool a very clumsy tool. And words are garden tools with which to till the soil of one's life. — Joy Kogawa

His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence. — Vladimir Nabokov

I took up space. I was a collection of cells and memories, awkward limbs and clumsy fashion crimes; I was the repository of my parents' expectations and evidence of their disappointments — Robin Wasserman

Sometimes it even seemed to him that this "idiot's tale" had captivated the ordinary person to a significantly greater degree than the circumstances of his or her actual life. Practically everyone Filippov knew liked to talk about what in no way affected them personally. It was as if they'd erected a fortress wall around themselves - a Great Wall of China of inexhaustible nonsense. They'd barricaded themselves in the inner courtyard of their paltry and, as it doubtless seemed to them, insignificant lives. While leaving this clumsy but inevitable self-humiliation on their conscience, Filippov nonetheless pitied those ordinary people. He — Andrey Gelasimov

The Englishman's approach to vulgarity is so clumsy that it makes it seem dirtier than it really is, but the Frenchman lifts it with a light, dexterous touch onto a plane of inimitable humour. To go to bed with Balzac is to know what one has missed all one's life. — Jean Lucey Pratt

A career path is rarely a path at all. A more interesting life is usual a more crooked, winding path of missteps, luck and vigorous work. It is almost always a clumsy balance between the things you try to make happen and the things that happen to you. — Tom Freston

Loving the Hands

I could make a wardrobe
with tufts of wool
caught on thistle and bracken.

Lost - the scraps
I might have woven whole cloth.

"Come watch," the man says,
shearing sheep
with the precision of long practice,
fleece, removed all of a piece,
rolled in a neat bundle.

I've been so clumsy
with people people who've loved me.

Straddling a ewe,
the man props its head on his foot,
leans down with clippers,
each pass across the coat a caress.

His dogs, lying nearby,
tremble at every move - as I do,
loving the hands that have learned
to gentle the life beneath them. — Julie Suk

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion. — Umberto Eco

If my life was a song the title would probably be 'Clumsy', 'cause I'm clumsy. — Pia Toscano

Humans are often more stupid than they realize. Because of our weaknesses are so easily exploited. Just like a child's clumsy fingers messing up the buttons on a shirt. It's easy to mock someone who buttoned his shirt wrongly. It's easy to mock someone who had buttoned wrongly yet remains oblivious to it. But there are also people who completely fail to realize that they buttoned them all wrongly. Just a moment's error, a wrong choice, traps us on the road of no return. But who can reprimand them for that? Why can't humans be lonely? Why can't we yearn for those right by our side? On such a cold lonely night, who can stand to bear it alone? Imagine the fright when we realize the severity of our mistakes. Whoever said love was a happy affair? — Yuuri Eda

I suppose I am one of life's naturally clumsy people; I don't drop stuff all the time, or break things, but I'm just generally a bit flustered. — Karen Gillan

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years ... I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside. — Rick Bragg

Everyone makes their own path, and I must make mine. The Bhagavad Gita - and ancient Indian Yogic text - says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life perfectly. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly. It is mine. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Above all her voice moved him. He had not known that an accent seduced his emotions. But he'd always been drawn to those with an accent. Be it woman or man. It sounded nicer. A lavender husk. More proper, elegant. American English was clumsy, clipped, flat. No lilt, nothing guttural, boring, unpleasant. He had no exotic fetishes. His attuned ear seemed to be remembering voices from another life, another time. He could never escape the sense that he'd lost a life dear to him and that life was lived in another language. — Wheston Chancellor Grove

I'm very headstrong and I know what I want from life. I listen to peoples' opinions, but a lot of the time I'll trust my own instincts. I'm also really clumsy, so I'm always getting hurt. — Ashley Tisdale

Old Milgrom pauses to console the girl and tells her she's not the only one who's clumsy, that she herself couldn't do anything when she was young - boil an egg or hem a diaper - and then she learned. Life taught her. — Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Have suggested throughout this book that the New Testament itself answers the first half of each of these prayers in terms, primarily, of a clear list of character traits whose radical novelty is generated from within the life, vision, achievement, death, and resurrection of Jesus himself. These events, taken together, constitute Jesus's followers as the true, image-bearing human beings, the royal priesthood. I have proposed, further, that according to the New Testament the way God the Holy Spirit answers the second half of the prayer is by renewing the individual heart and mind so that we can freely and consciously choose to practice those habits of behavior which, awkward and clumsy at first, will gradually become second nature. — N. T. Wright

To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculating fingers what it has offered; this is music, made after long silence. The soul flexes its wings, and, clumsy as any fledgling, tries the air again — Mary Stewart

I'd much rather fall to my death than admit my weakness to you."
"The captain of the Royal Guard wants to impress a lowly handmaiden?"
"A clumsy young man wants to impress a beautiful young woman. — Renee Ahdieh

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form. — Will Smith

Bosch knew the dawn had nothing on the dusk. Dawn always came up ugly, as if the sun was clumsy and in a hurry. The dusk was smoother, the moon more graceful. Maybe it was because the moon was more patient. In life and nature, Bosch thought, darkness always waits. — Michael Connelly

I'm not a sympathetic main character. My quirks are not lovable. I am not clumsy. I am not overwhelmed by life. I am not unlucky in love. — Rahul Kanakia