Quotes & Sayings About Lost In Time

Syn pulled Furi to his chest. "Furi, I want you to go back through the bar and go wait at my place. I'm going to have a little chat with your ex-husband," Syn said extra loudly.

Furi huffed in annoyance, "Syn, I took six months of self-defense courses at the YMCA this year. I can fight for myself."

Syn looked at Furi like he'd lost his damn mind. "At the Y? Well hell, that's great Furious. If you ever get jumped by the Village People, feel free to pull out those moves. As for now, I want you to take your karate-kicking-YMCA-going-ass back to my apartment," Syn snarled at Furi, urging him toward the door, having neither the time nor the patience to argue with his ridiculous pride. Thankfully, with one final glare Furi went back into the pub. When Syn turned back, God and Day were looking back and forth between him and his two foes.


"What's going on here, fellas?" God asked casually, not acknowledging Syn. — A.E. Via

What use was there in calling a day by a certain name, or thinking of it as anything but weather? They knew what time of the year it was when the timothy bloomed, when the birds were fledging. They knew it was morning when the sun came up. What more was there to know? If Doll was going to be lost forever, Lila wanted to be right there with her, holding to the skirt of her dress. She had — Marilynne Robinson

She got fired?" Confusion laced Gavin's voice. "When?"
"This morning," Dante muttered.
"Why?" Gavin asked. "What did she do?"
"Me," Dante said.
"Oh." A moment of silence passed before Gavin broke out into laughter. "Ah man, really? She lost her job for fucking around with you?"
"I don't see why that's so funny."
"Because," Gavin said, "you're the worst consolation prize ever."
Dante shot right back up, and Matty barely had enough time to move out of the way before the bottle of water hurled by him, hitting Gavin in the chest. — J.M. Darhower

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers! — Alice McDermott

To walk in Time, perhaps, as men walk on long roads ... to see the lie of old and even forgotten lands, to behold ancient men walking, and to hear their languages as they spoke them, in the days before the days, when tongues of forgotten lineage were heard in kingdoms long fallen by the shores of the Atlantic.
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lost Road — J.R.R. Tolkien

When the race is ended, and the play is either won or lost, and ye are in the utmost circle and border of time, and shall put your foot within the march of eternity, all the good things of your short nightdream shall seem to you like ashes of a blaze of thorns or straw. — Samuel Rutherford

Here's one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning. It's like that old riddle about a tree falling in a forest, and whether it makes a sound if there's no one around to hear it.
You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every time. That's how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to bust out of orbit, to spin out to a place where no one can touch you. To lose yourself
to get lost.
Or maybe you wouldn't be surprised. Maybe some of you already know.
To those people, I can only say: I'm sorry. — Lauren Oliver

Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point, we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity. — Richard J. Foster

Scripture says: "Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted." I call on every American family and the family of America to observe a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance, honoring the memory of the thousands of victims of these brutal attacks and comforting those who lost loved ones. We will persevere through this national tragedy and personal loss. In time, we will find healing and recovery; and, in the face of all this evil, we remain strong and united, "one Nation under God." — George W. Bush

For the first time since Ben died, I look like a widow. For the first time since I lost him, I feel like I recognize the person in the mirror. There I am, grief-stricken and un-whole. Widowed. It's such a relief to see myself this way. I have felt so insecure in my widowness that seeing myself look like a widow comforts me. — Taylor Jenkins Reid

In the prayer time, the battle of the spiritual life is lost or won. — E. Stanley Jones

I walked into the bathroom and stared at myself for a long time in the mirror, unable to see who was looking back at me-the girl broken and lost to a man she fell in love with or a woman who learned to survive with a broken heart. Maybe I was a little of both. — Nashoda Rose

We aren't in high school. We aren't really in our families and we aren't in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren't us. If think they are, then we're lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren't any place or any time ... We are everywhere. — Ann Brashares

I also think within the scene, a specific scene - if I were to play a part that I played 10 years ago now, my interpretation of that scene would be totally different. I would be making different choices. Because I can't somehow subtract all of the experiences that I've had in my life. And it's fascinating to see, because somewhere I'm very reflective in that. You know, I've been playing basically actually close to 40 years old, so I'm somewhere lost in age in this movie. But it's been fascinating to see that I can't subtract that time. — Jake Gyllenhaal

We love a world in which the people in the white hats get rewarded and the people in the black hats pay the price. And that I have to say doesn't happen very often, particularly in a very complex economy. We're in a time of panic where people have lost trust in what the banks are doing, what the investment firms are doing - lost trust beyond a level of reasonableness, to be honest. And, it's got to be stopped. — Rebecca M. Blank

Yakov spent the whole day playing his fiddle; when it got completely dark, he took the notebook in which he recorded his losses daily, and out of boredom began adding up the yearly total. It came to over a thousand roubles. This astounded him so much that he flung the abacus to the floor and stamped his feet. Then he picked up the abacus, again clicked away for a long time, and sighed deeply and tensely. His face was purple and wet with sweat. He thought that if he could have put that lost thousand roubles in the bank, he would have earned at least forty roubles a year in interest. And therefore those forty roubles were a loss. In short, wherever you turned, there was nothing but losses everywhere.
- Rothchild's Fiddle — Anton Chekhov

Time, That Is Pleased to Lengthen out the Day

Time, that is pleased to lengthen out the day
For grieving lovers parted or denied,
And pleased to hurry the sweet hours away
From such as lie enchanted side by side,
Is not my kinsman; nay, my feudal foe
Is he that in my childhood was the thief
Of all my mother's beauty, and in woe
My father bowed, and brought our house to grief.
Thus, though he think to touch with hateful frost
Your treasured curls, and your clear forehead line,
And so persuade me from you, he has lost;
Never shall he inherit what was mine.
When Time and all his tricks have done their worst,
Still will I hold you dear, and him accurst. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I've lost 12 inches in three weeks. Every time I go for the costume fitting each week, it's smaller and smaller. I'm feeling great. I'm putting in the work. I'm getting a lot of sleep. Everything is on the backburner right now. 'Dancing' is my priority. — Ricki Lake

Then you wake up in Barstow California. Another dissociative fugue. It's like time traveling. It's late November now. What ever happened at teresa is a mystery to you. In Godforsaken Barstow, where the golden state shits itself into the desert, people are eatting each other. Has it always been this way? — Lost Zombies

No one rises above who he or she has been without first having fallen down. The best time - in fact, the only time - to make a real change in your life is in the moment of seeing the need for it. He who hesitates always gets lost in the hundred reasons why tomorrow is a better day to get started. — Guy Finley

This book attempts to
record a journey to restoration that applies to ordinary people like you and I. It is a shot towards healing. A step headed for a new consciousness. It emerges from a moment in time where all seems lost. — Phindiwe Nkosi

The significant difference between Proust and Faulkner, for Sartre, is that where Proust discovers salvation in time, in the recovery of time past, for Faulkner time is never lost, however much he may want, like a mystic, to forget time. Both writers emphasize the transitoriness of emotion, of the condition of love or misery, or whatever passes because it is transitory in time. "Proust really should have employed a technique like Faulkner's," Sartre legislates, "that was the logical outcome of his metaphysic. Faulkner, however, is a lost man, and because he knows that he is lost he risks pushing his thoughts to its conclusion. Proust is a classicist and a Frenchman; and the French lose themselves with caution and always end by finding themselves. — John McCormick

I shun all activities and you have none. You have freed yourself from all duties which had been forced on you. And so you need not know what time of the day or what time of the week, or numbers, reckoning of before and after, when and how far; in short you don't have to know the business of counting, which habit has made us human beings miserable in many ways. We have lost the faculty of appreciating the present living moment. We are always looking forward or backward and waiting for one or sighing for the other, and lose the pleasure of awareness of the moment in which we actually exist. — R.K. Narayan

About the time I turned 50, I experienced the profound biological change that often accompanies women at that age. Also, I put two kids in college and lost both of my parents, so I'm no longer somebody's daughter. — Jane Pauley

Someone once asked me if I knew the feeling of fear. Oh, I knew fear. Well, really speaking I never feared any fucker at that time; I've got to be honest. But I knew fear, the fear of losing! There was never any fear of combat! My father instilled that fear in to me and that was what drove me on to win ... the fear of what was to come after you went home saying you'd lost! — Stephen Richards

Solitude is one thing and being alone is another. Solitude can be isolation, an escape, an unwanted thing; but to be alone without the burden of life, with that utter freedom in which time/thought has never been, is to be with the universe. In solitude there is despairing loneliness, a sense of being abandoned, lost, craving for some kind of relationship, like a ship lost at sea. All our daily activity leads to this isolation, with its endless conflicts and miseries, and rare joys thrown in. This isolation is corruption, manifested in politics, in business and of course in organized religions. Corruption exists in the very high places and on the very doorstep. To be tied is corruption; any form of attachment leads to it, whether it be to a belief, faith, ideal, experience, or any conclusion. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

He always knew what I would have liked to say, and with startling and increasing accuracy as we spent more time together. One time, for example, I was wondering exactly how he had lost that tooth at the back of his mouth when he saw my eyes on his waning grin and replied, "Ran into a fence when I was twelve." And then I wondered how the heck he could have missed the giant fence standing right in front of him and he said, "Shut up. — Rose Christo

IT SEEMS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE, but there was once a time when human beings did not feel the need to share their every waking moment with hundreds of millions, even billions, of complete and utter strangers. If one went to a shopping mall to purchase an article of clothing, one did not post minute-by-minute details on a social networking site; and if one made a fool of oneself at a party, one did not leave a photographic record of the sorry episode in a digital scrapbook that would survive for all eternity. But now, in the era of lost inhibition, it seemed no detail of life was too mundane or humiliating to share. In the online age, it was more important to live out loud than to live with dignity. Internet followers were more treasured than flesh-and-blood friends, for they held the illusive promise of celebrity, even immortality. Were Descartes alive today, he might have written: I tweet, therefore I am. — Daniel Silva

Apart from these parental physical jerks, he did not train his body; he merely inhabited it. A friend had once shown what he called gymnastics for the intelligentsia. You took a box of matches and threw its contents on the floor, then bent down and picked them up, one by one. The first time he tried it himself, he lost patience and stuffed all the matches back in handfuls. He persevered, but the next time, just as he was bending down, the telephone went, and he was needed at once; so the housekeeper was detailed to pick up the matches instead. — Julian Barnes

There was an old belief that in the embers
Of all things their primordial form exists,
And cunning alchemists
Could re-create the rose with all its members
From its own ashes, but without the bloom,
Without the lost perfume
Ah me! what wonder-working, occult science
Can from the ashes in our hearts once more
The rose of youth restore?
What craft of alchemy can bid defiance
To time and change, and for a single hour
Renew this phantom-flower? — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

For a time Dish lost all sense of what life was about. He even lost the sense that he was a cowboy, the strongest sense he had to work with. He was just a fellow with a glass in his hand, whose life had suddenly turned to mud. The day before he had been a top hand, but what did that mean anymore? — Larry McMurtry

When I was teaching basketball, I urged my players to try their hardest to improve on that very day, to make that practice a masterpiece.
Too often we get distracted by what is outside our control. You can't do anything about yesterday. The door to the past has been shut and the key thrown away. You can do nothing about tomorrow. It is yet to come. However, tomorrow is in large part determined by what you do today. So make today a masterpiece. You have control over that.
This rule is even more important in life than basketball. You have to apply yourself each day to become a little better. By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better. Only then will you will be able to approach being the best you can be. It begins by trying to make each day count and knowing you can never make up for a lost day. — John Wooden

Procrastinating is number three on my Stupid List. You still end up exactly where you didn't want to be, doing exactly what you didn't want to do, withe the only difference being that you lost all that time in between, during which you could have been doing something fun. Even worse, you probably stayed in a stressed-out, crappy mood the whole time you were avoiding it. If you know something is inevitable, do it and get it over with. Move on. Life is short. — Karen Marie Moning

It seems as if everything she's cared about over the past twenty-five years has disintegrated, oblivious to the time and energy she has invested. She can call herself a physician but can't take the same pride in this she used to. She is not really a wife at the moment, not much of a mother. Somewhere along the way, Somer realizes, she has lost herself. — Shilpi Somaya Gowda

He openned the door that he assumed was the garage only to find himself in the pantry.
crap.
"Um ... grabbing some Pop-Tarts for the road," Nick said, covering his mistake. Still, they both stared at him as if he'd escaped Arkham Asylum. Offering them a fake smile, he grabbed the pastries, crossed himself, and hoped he got the next door correct.
Nope. Bathroom.
With a pain-filled groan at his rampant stupidity, Nick pretended to use it before he tried again. At least there were only two more doors to go.
Fifty-fifty chance.
Thankfully, third time was the charm. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Catelyn had not eaten today. Perhaps that had been unwise. She told herself that there had been no time, but the truth was that food had lost its savor in a world without Ned. 'When they took his head off, they killed me too. — George R R Martin

(Second kiss)
Only a kiss?
It was staggering.
Her mind was lost to time and place, as if nothing existed beyond his divine mouth. He discarded her bonnet and tangled his fingers in her hair. She whimpered, clutching at his lapels, yet he refused to relent. Mercilessly, he intensified the kiss, pulling her so far in; submerging her in so much sensation
that Mary thought she would drown in the pleasure of it. — Victoria Vane

For the first time, there's no barrier between us and we make eye contact. All of a sudden, I feel like the character in Raiders of the Lost Ark - the one who watches in horror as the wispy, beautiful angels floating from the Ark of the Covenant morph into howling, homicidal demons. You know, right before he melts like a cheap candle. — Elle Lothlorien

He looked at the craft beached around him. Shadowless in the vertical sunlight, their rounded forms seemed to have been eroded of all but a faint residue of their original identities, like ghosts in a distant universe where drained images lay in the shallows of some lost time. The — J.G. Ballard

Only happy people have nightmares, from overeating. For those who live a nightmare reality, sleep is a black hole, lost in time, like death. — Guy Sajer

What I remember most clearly was that when I put down a suggestion that seemed to me cogent and reasonable, Einstein did not in the least contest this, but he only said, 'Oh, how ugly.' As soon as an equation seemed to him to be ugly, he really rather lost interest in it and could not understand why somebody else was willing to spend much time on it. He was quite convinced that beauty was a guiding principle in the search for important results in theoretical physics. — Hermann Bondi

It may have lost its special-ness forever and the clubs might not being doing well but I think standup is in the best shape it has been in a long time. — Marc Maron

was far too young to be bugged, stalked, and murdered. I had never been to Bora Bora or finished In Search of Lost Time or run naked around the Washington Monument or gone skiing with Karl Lagerfeld. I had so much living to do. — Karin Tanabe

All I said was that I thought it was a judgement from God that Blyth had first lost his leg and then had the replacement become the instrument of his downfall. All because of the rabbits. Eric, who was going through a religious phase at the time which I suppose I was to some extent copying, thought this was a terrible thing to say; God wasn't like that. I said the one I believed in was. — Iain Banks

You're lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and you've locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when you're like that, unguarded, than when you're awake. When you're awake you're like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids. I can't reach you anymore. Once upon a time I could, but not now, and not for a long time. — Nicole Krauss

The next minute or so was spent howling on the ceiling . Imp No.1 joined in, but he wasn't really feeling it. It shouldn't be "Who do we hate?", he thought, it really should be "whom", but this probably wasn't a good time to bring that up. — Eoin Colfer

Love is a form of energy, and similar to all forms of energy, it is both essential for life and dangerous. Love can enrich a person's life or destroy a person's world. Love is a catalytic agent of change because it makes us dare to become the best person that we can be. Falling in love for the first time drives a person to the cusp of madness, while the bitter aftermath of a love lost irrevocably alters the positive and negative aspects of a person's character. Withstanding rejection by a lover, we discover within us those ingredients that we will need in order to find our life mate and complete ourselves as man and woman. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I'm sorry it was such a long wait. I hope this night makes up for time lost. I can't promise you that you'll never fall, Harper. But if you ever need me for anything, I'll be there. I'll catch you. I'll fix it. And if we ever have to be apart, always know that we're together." He lifts my wedding ring to his lips and kisses it. "We met years ago. We drifted apart to become these two people. And now we're back together. One soul, cut in half, reunited. — J.A. Huss

We'd read about sirens in English this fall; Greek mythology bullshit about women so beautiful, their voices so enchanting, that men did anything for them. Turned out that mythology crap was real because every time I saw her, I lost my mind. — Katie McGarry

His father asked Ethan in a raspy voice, "You spend time with your son?" "Much as I can," he'd answered, but his father had caught the lie in his eyes. "It'll be your loss, Ethan. Day'll come, when he's grown and it's too late, that you'd give a kingdom to go back and spend a single hour with your son as a boy. To hold him. Read a book to him. Throw a ball with a person in whose eyes you can do no wrong. He doesn't see your failings yet. He looks at you with pure love and it won't last, so you revel in it while it's here." Ethan thinks often of that conversation, mostly when he's lying awake in bed at night and everyone else is asleep, and his life screaming past at the speed of light - the weight of bills and the future and his prior failings and all these moments he's missing - all the lost joy - perched like a boulder on his chest. — Blake Crouch

The tragedy of my species xxx is that it does not live in its own time. Homo sapiens is locked on history's rearview mirror, never the road ahead, bent on catching some presumed lost paradise xxx
xxx
The human race is destroying itself with nostalgia ... — James K. Morrow

Sinners in their natural state lie dead, lifeless, and moveless; they can no more believe in Christ, nor repent, than a dead man can speak or walk: but, in virtue of the promise, the Spirit of life from Christ Jesus, at the time appointed, enters into the dead soul, and quickens it; so that it is no more morally dead, but alive, having new spiritual powers put into it, that were lost by Adam's fall. — Thomas Boston

He shook the hair out of his face. "I'm not interested in court ladies," he said thickly, and kissed her. His mouth was warm, and his lips were smooth, and Celaena lost all sense of time and place as she slowly kissed him back. He pulled away for a moment, looked into her eyes as they opened, and kissed her again. It was different this time - deeper, full of need. — Sarah J. Maas

She felt the familiar old constriction in her chest - that combination of desire and urgency. She needed more hours - many more hours - if she was ever to study these questions as they deserved to be studied. She would never have enough hours. She had already lost so much time this week. Every soul in the world seemed to believe that Alma's hours belonged to him. How was she ever meant to devote herself to proper scientific exploration? — Elizabeth Gilbert

It had been a beautiful day for an outdoor ceremony, with the kind of lucid weather she hoped to have at her own funeral. She thought often of her own death, but without fear, loss having been her only belonging in this life. For years, acceptance had been her only means of survival. She knew that no matter how miserable or wretched life became, all she could do with her meek piece of time was sustain it. Decades of guilt, lost faith, the betrayal by those few people she'd let herself love - it was worth enduring these things, if only for the gift of a single, exalted moment. And such moments happened, even frequently, in the lives of people wise enough to see them. — Esi Edugyan

Myths are what remain once the history of an event has been forgotten or lost to time. Myths are like the memory of one's first crush; the pain and longing one felt at that time is forgotten, but the warmth and sweetness of romance lives on, probably even magnified, larger in the imagination than it was in reality. — Shatrujeet Nath

Once a person has taken their life, in the inner realms, the suicide will repeat automatically the feelings of despair and fear which preceded his self murder, and go through the act and the death struggle time after time with ghastly persistence ... They remain conscious - often entangled in the final scene of the earth life for a very long time, unaware that they have lost the physical body. — Annie Besant

The root of impatience in discipline is really the same as that of overindulgence. In both instances, parents want to make up for lost time, to speed up a process that takes time. — Russell D. Moore

When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one he'd expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry. — Barack Obama

My
emotional compass had vanished. I lost all sense of
direction, of time, of the sense of who I was. I don't know
when it began, or when it ended, but before I knew it I was
locked away, alone and numb in the endless winter of that
world of ice. — Haruki Murakami

Found one of my old journals. from right around the time we were heading out on tour with NFG in the UK early 2008. i started reading it and couldn't help but cry a little bit. cause that person was really confused. and very lost. and as it went on, the person behind the pen seemed to get a little bit stronger.. that part felt good. it was the reminder that i needed that right now i'm as strong as ever. there really isn't a point to telling you all of this. except maybe i want to thank you. cause you are a constant reminder. that i'm not as lost as i once was. — Hayley Williams

I was in and out of comas until I was nine and I would lose entire days and weeks. The novelty of being able to really do stuff hasn't worn off - I still feel like I'm making up for lost time. — Jim Davis

I really like scripted dramas. My favorite show of all time would have to be 'Lost': I loved how the writers and producers were able to weave the different storylines together; and the acting in that show was incredible. — Nick Jonas

And therefore take good heed unto time, how that thou dispendest it: for nothing is more precious than time. In one little time, as little as it is, may heaven be won and lost. — James Walsh

I was an optimist, a great champion of the human spirit. And I lost that for a time. I feel like I've regained a bit of that in the last few years but there was a period of my life in which I had a very low opinion of people in general. — Jude Law

What they say is, life goes on, and that is mostly true. The mail is delivered and the Christmas lights go up and the ladders get put away and you open yet another box of cereal. In time, the volume of my feelings would be turned down in gentle increments to a near quiet, and yet the record would still spin, always spin. There was a place for Rose so deeply within myself that it was another country, another world, with its own light and time and its own language. A lost world. Yet its foundations and edges were permanent-the ruins of Pompeii, the glorious remnants or the Forum. A world that endured, even as it retreated into the past. A world visited, imagined, ever waiting, yet asleep — Deb Caletti

History gets reinterpreted as time goes on. Many times, the participants are lost in the retelling of the story. — Buzz Aldrin

Infidelity and faith look both through the perspective glass, but at contrary ends. Infidelity looks through the wrong end of the glass; and, therefore, sees those objects near which are afar off, and makes great things little,-diminishing the greatest spiritual blessings, and removing far from us threatened evils. Faith looks at the right end, and brings the blessings that are far off in time close to our eye, and multiplies God's mercies, which, in a distance, lost their greatness. — Joseph Hall

Kaylee, this means something to me." His hands trailed down my arms to cup my elbows, and his gaze held mine. "With any
luck, we're going to have millions of moments over the course of eternity, and I plan to love every one of them. But we'll never
have this moment again, and this is very important to me." The twists of blue in his eyes coiled so tightly the color was almost gone,
lost among pale shades of a need so deep it couldn't possibly be captured in a kiss, or a touch. "I need to know that this is important
to you, too. I need to know that this isn't like last time. That you're not doing this just so you can say you've done it. Because that's
not good enough for me. That's not good enough for us. — Rachel Vincent

How many radio shows I did is lost to memory now; it's in the hundreds - maybe even close to being in the thousands - for the span of years from the time I was eight till I was about fifteen. — Mel Torme

Easing back in her seat, Grace watched the children in the playground opposite, coats off, faces flushed, laughing hysterically with pleasure. They were so vividly alive, completely immersed in the game. She tried to recall a time when she'd been that way and realized she couldn't remember when that had been. She'd lost the knack of forgetting herself. Instead she seemed to look down on herself throughout the day, scrutinizing, judging; finding herself wanting more. — Kathleen Tessaro

There are ways in, journeys to the center of life, through time; through air, matter, dream and thought. The ways are not always mapped or charted, but sometimes being lost, if there is such a thing, is the sweetest place to be. And always, in this search, a person might find that she is already there, at the center of the world. It may be a broken world, but it is glorious nonetheless. — Linda Hogan

No one goes anywhere alone, least of all into exile - not even those who arrive physically alone, unaccompanied by family, spouse, children, parents, or siblings. No one leaves his or her world without having been transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in a time of misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence possibly now forgotten by the one who had said it. — Paulo Freire

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious. — Muriel Spark

In the history of mankind many republics have risen, have flourished for a less or greater time, and then have fallen because their citizens lost the power of governing themselves and thereby of governing their state; and in no way has this loss of power been so often and so clearly shown as in the tendency to turn the government into a government primarily for the benefit of one class instead of a government for the benefit of the people as a whole. — Theodore Roosevelt

The thing is, you make choices. You do some things and you don't do others and in the end there's not much point in asking what different choices might have gained you, and lost you, unless you have a time machine. You become those choices, you embody them ...
I'd known I couldn't stay, just as I'd known years before I couldn't be with him, even as I'd gone on pretending I had a choice. I was who I was, and I wanted what I already had. — Leah Stewart

Sometimes, when you're feeling you're lowest, the real you is summoned~And you understand, maybe for the first time ever, how grand you are, because you discover that vulnerable doesn't mean powerless, scared doesn't mean lacking in beauty, and uncertainty doesn't mean that you're lost~These realizations alone will set you on a journey that you will take you far beyond what you used to think of as extraordinary.~There is always a bright side, The Universe — Mike Dooley

The potential for loss of soul
to one degree or another
is the affliction of a society that as a collective has lost its sense of the holy, of a culture that values everything else above the spiritual. We live in such a spiritually impoverished culture
and in such a time. Loss of soul, to one degree or another, is a constant teasing possibility. We are invited at every corner to hedge on the truth, indulge outselves, act as if our words and actions have no ultimate consequence, make an absolute of the material world, and treat the spiritual world as if it were some kind of frothy, angelic fantasy. In such a world the soul struggles for survival; in such a world a man can lose his own soul and have the whole culture support him, and in such a world, conversely, the light of a single, great soul that lives in integrity can truly illumine the world. — Daphne Rose Kingma

Edith's clothes were flung in disarray on the floor beside the bed, the covers of which had been thrown back carelessly; she lay naked and glistening under the light on the white unwrinkled sheet. Her body was lax and wanton in its naked sprawl, and it shone like pale gold. William came nearer the bed. She was fast asleep, but in a trick of the light her slightly opened mouth seemed to shape the soundless words of passion and love. He stood looking at her for a long time. He felt a distant pity and reluctant friendship and familiar respect; and he felt also a weary sadness, for he knew that he would never again be moved as he had once been moved by her presence. The sadness lessened, and he covered her gently, turned out the light, and got in bed beside her. — John Edward Williams

Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once. — Octavio Paz

Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost ... It is what you live in. — James Glieck

Daniel is asleep. A care assistant, a different one today is swishingaroundthe room with a mop that smells of pine cleaner.

Elisabeth wonders what's doing to happen to all the care assistants. She realizes she hasn't so far encountered a single care assistant here who isn't from somewhere else in the world. That morning on the radio she;d heard a spokesperson say, but it's not just that we;ve been rhetorically and practically encouraging the opposite of integration for immigrants to this country. It's that we've been rhetorically and practically encouraging ourselves not to integrate. We've been doing this as a matter of self-policing since Thatcher taught us to be selfish and not just to think but to believe that there's no such thing as society.

Then the other spokesperson in the dialogue said, well, you would say that. Get over it. Grow up. Your time's over. Democracy. You lost. — Ali Smith

People have fallen in love with words and lost the world. It's time to regain it. — Jaggi Vasudev

At the time, I prayed to God only intermittently, and then mainly to ask for things, such as: "Please let me get an A on my next test." "Please let me do well in Little League this year." "Please let my skin clear up for the school picture." I used to envision God as the Great Problem Solver, the one who would fix everything if I just prayed hard enough, used the correct prayers, and prayed in precisely the right way. But when God couldn't fix things (which seemed more frequent than I would have liked), I would turn to St. Jude. I figured that if it was beyond the capacity of God to do something, then surely it must be a lost cause, and it was time to call on St. Jude. — James Martin

This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie - no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I take a sun bath and listen to the hours, formulating, and disintegrating under the pines, and smell the resiny hardihood of the high noon hours. The world is lost in a blue haze of distances, and the immediate sleeps in a thin and finite sun. — Zelda Fitzgerald

Goldilocks in the flesh. He zoned out for a second, lost in the smooth texture of her skin, so he had zero time to react when the bikini top flying through the air hit him in the chest ...
She contemplated the ground for a second. "I'd like my top back, please."
"I don't know," he teased. "It could be construed as a deadly weapon. — Robin Bielman

I think that we have created a new kind of person in a way. We have created a child who will be so exposed to the media that he will be lost to his parents by the time he is 12. — David Bowie

He'd grown up an untroubled believer, but the war had put an end to that. What God could permit such misery and slaughter? But, in time, he had found consolation in a God beyond understanding, and prayed for those he'd lost, for those he loved, and an end to evil in the world. — Alan Furst

I flipped through Xuanzang's records almost 1400 years later, and thought that the written word was a fragile truth. His records were meticulous, but there was a vastness left unsaid. There were spools of thought that fell through the cracks and were swallowed by time. I hungered to know if he ever lost sight of is training, if on empty mountain roads loneliness crept into the sides of his mind till he thought he was mad, if in foreign marketplaces he succumbed to desire or greed or temper. — Mishi Saran

Lost Wax"

My love gives me some wax,
so for once instead of words
I work at something real;
I knead until I see emerge
a person, a protagonist;
but I must overwork my wax,
it loses it's resiliency,
comes apart in crumbs.

I take another block;
this work, I think, will be a self;
I can feel it forming, brow
and brain; perhaps it will be me,
perhaps, if I can create myself,
I'll be able to amend myself;
my wax, though, freezes
this time, fissures, splits.

Words or wax, no end
to our self-shaping, our forlorn
awareness at the end of which
is only more awareness.
Was ever truth so malleable?
Arid, inadhesive bits of matter.
What might heal you? Love.
What might make you whole? Love. My love. — C. K. Williams

Nothing could be slow enough, nothing lasts too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Barton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; seen it between peoples shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She walked to the window. — Virginia Woolf

When I rest I feel utterly lifeless except that my throat burns when I draw breath ... I can scarcely go on. No despair, no happiness, no anxiety. I have not lost the mastery of my feelings, there are actually no more feelings. I consist only of will. After each few metres this too fizzles out in unending tiredness. Then I think nothing. I let myself fall, just lie there. For an indefinite time I remain completely irresolute. Then I make a few steps again. — Reinhold Messner

If the Democrats feel they have lost the public's confidence in their stewardship of national security, then the threat of Iran offers a Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, or John Kerry an opportunity to get out front now and pledge support for a united effort - attacking Bush from the right about too tepid a stance rather from the predictable left that we are 'hegemonic' and 'imperialistic' every time we use force abroad. — Victor Davis Hanson

Here they found themselves year after year- a group of busy, youngish women who had eased their cars impatiently through the archaic streets of Rosedale, who had complained for a week previously about the time lost, the fuss over the children's dresses, and, above all, the boredom, but who were drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance- not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles's living room. — Alice Munro

He had cast out of heaven his dim star; it had fallen, and its track was lost in the darkness of night. It would never return to the sky again, because life was given only once and never came a second time. If he could have turned back the days and years of the past, he would have replaced the falsity with truth, the idleness with work, the boredom with happiness; he would have given back purity to those whom he had robbed of it. He would have found God and goodness, but that was as impossible as to put back the fallen star into the sky, and because it was impossible he was in despair. — Anton Chekhov

Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, 'were always lost, because they'd never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way. — Rebecca Solnit

It is unfortunate that some in our party have lost sight of the importance of conservation and environmental protection for keeping America strong, healthy, prosperous, and secure. It's time for all of our Republican leaders to recognize that conservation is conservative. — David Jenkins

I never really lost a game in my career, sometimes I just ran out of time. — Bobby Layne

There are few times when we know with absolute certainty we are going to do something for the last time. Life has a way of moving in circles, bringing us back to places we didn't expect
and taking us away from those we do. There are too many times we don't pay close enough attention, and moments are lost in our assumption we'll have another chance. — Megan Hart