Mislaid Quotes & Sayings

You've mislaid your trust in the past, had your faith in people broken, shattered even. You've been betrayed. Lied to. So you've chosen not to trust. And this protects you to some extent, I'm sure. But it also isolates you from the rest of humanity. You are disconnected. You are displaced. And the only way to find your way back to a place, to a connection, is to trust again. — Dennis Lehane

All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. This couldn't be it. It had been diverted elsewhere, to somebody else, and he'd been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead — Lev Grossman

So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel that they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced. — Aldous Huxley

An elderly man called Keith Mislaid his set of false teeth - They'd been laid on a chair, He'd forgot they were there, Sat down, and was bitten beneath. Irish limerick — Janice Thompson

But when they changed their plans time and time again, the dates became confused, the periods were mislaid, and one day seemed so much like another that one could not feel them pass. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Paradise is there, behind that door, in the next room; but I have lost the key.
Perhaps I have only mislaid it. — Kahlil Gibran

I would like to like to make one thing clear at the very outset and that is, when you speak of a train robbery, this involved no loss of train, merely what I like to call the contents of the train, which were pilfered. We haven't lost a train since 1946, I believe it was - the year of the great snows when we mislaid a small one. — Peter Cook

When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself. — Graham Greene

I was an utterance in absentia. I was a forgotten word, uttered and mislaid long ago. I was the word that existed because there was another word that was my opposite, and without it I was nothing. I gained meaning only by acknowledging that possible other.
Nida — Faiqa Mansab

Here all of nature was captured, labeled, arranged according to a logic that seemed as timeless as if ordered by God, perhaps a God who had mislaid the original paperwork on the Creation and had requested the Field Museum staff to help him out and keep track of it all. — Audrey Niffenegger

I was going to shave this morning but mislaid my chin — Benny Bellamacina

Wall Street had been doing business with pieces of paper; and now someone asked for a dollar, and it was discovered that the dollar had been mislaid. — Upton Sinclair

Don't you think you should retire again? The first retiral seems to have got mislaid. — Dorothy Dunnett

In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret's nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle. — Catherine Drinker Bowen

The lost women I need to know their names those women I would have walked with, jauntily the way men go in groups swinging their arms, and the ones those sweating women whom I would have joined After a hard game to chew the fat what would we have called each other laughing joking into our beer? where are my gangs, my teams, my mislaid sisters? all the women who could have known me, where in the world are their names? — Lucille Clifton

This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was mean to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no "meaning" beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative's intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as more electrical than ethical. — Joan Didion

History is like the kitchen sink," Adam answered. "Everything goes round and round until eventually, sooner or later, most of it goes down the waste pipe. Things are forgotten. Things are mislaid. Things are covered up. Sometimes, it's simply a matter of neglect. — Alan Bradley

Among the dog leads, phones and hats, there would be babies hoped for and lost. All this would be remembered: missed opportunities, mislaid friends, the smile of a wife. It would be a place for lost things. — Tor Udall

He was one of those men who can both get money and keep it. He must have been a millionaire. He kept accounts. He introduced a post-office atmosphere into his shady dealings. Not a stamp, not a pen-nib escaped him, and he would stay up half the night to figure out what had happened to a mislaid farthing. You cannot conceive the caution and the meanness of that man! He would have made a Syrian pawn-broker appear like Diamond Jim Brady. But he had brains, and also nerve. At the same time, he was as smooth as glycerine. He looked like an octopus - he had a dirtyish pallor, no shape, evil eyes, and a beak. In shaking hands with him, you felt that six or seven other hands were investigating your pockets while a dozen eyes watched you. He was feared. He made money out of everything. But he was still unknown to the police. — Gerald Kersh

Will smirked, clearly pleased at the effect he was having. I've no idea. I lost consciousness about then. I was having a lovely dream about a young woman who had mislaid all her clothes ... — Cassandra Clare

They circulated, exchanging greetings, making courtesies. Why can't these people wear nametags? Cordelia thought hopelessly. As usual, everyone but her seemed to know everyone else. She pictured herself opening a conversation: Hey you, Vor-guy - . She clutched Aral more firmly, and tried to look mysterious and exotic rather than tongue-tied and mislaid. They — Lois McMaster Bujold

Camille, a few feet away, looked like a gypsy who had mislaid his violin and had been searching for it in a hedgerow; he frustrated daily the best efforts of an expensive tailor, wearing his clothes as a subtle comment on the collapsing social order. — Hilary Mantel

I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card. — Charles Baudelaire

Memories of that which we have lost are curious things - weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had and I have no longer — Alexander McCall Smith

One day God felt he ought to give his workshop a spring-clean ... . It was amazing what ragged bits and pieces came out from under his workbench as he swept. Beginnings of creatures, bits that looked useful but had seemed wrong, ideas that he'd mislaid and forgotten ... . There was even a tiny lump of sun. He scratched his head. What could be done with all this rubbish? Ted Hughes, "Leftovers," from The Dreamfighter — Cornelia Funke

Mislaid flame of tender emotions
Rekindled.
Together we live to the point of tears,
I wouldn't want it any other way. — Scott Hastie

To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key. — Clifton Fadiman

Yet he moved toward her, darkly shimmering out of the library shadows with feeding fangs ready. However, the moment he touched Miss Tarabotti, he was suddenly no longer darkly doing anything at all. He was simply standing there, the faint sounds of a string quartet in the background as he foolishly fished about with his tongue for fangs unaccountably mislaid. — Gail Carriger

While their normal working relations are pervaded by an atmosphere of intrigue and competitive resentment, Diana still feels a sense of responsibility towards her husband. When he returned to public duties last year following a lengthy recuperation from his broken arm he intended to make a bizarre "statement" regarding the intense speculation surrounding his injury. He instructed his staff to find a false arm with a hook on the end so that he could appear in public like a real-life Captain Hook. Diana was consulted by senior courtiers worried that he would make a fool of himself. She suggested that a false arm should be obtained but then conveniently mislaid shortly before he was to attend a medical meeting in Harley Street, central London. While Charles was annoyed by the subterfuge, his staff were relieved that his dignity had been preserved thanks to Diana's timely intervention. — Andrew Morton

The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid. — P.D. James

I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. — Joan Didion

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. — Lev Grossman

Actually she was at least in her late twenties (I never established her exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods. — Vladimir Nabokov

Defects and weakness in men's understandings, as well as other faculties, come from want of a right use of their own minds; I am apt to think, the fault is generally mislaid upon nature, and there is often a complaint of want of parts, when the fault lies in want of a due improvement of them. — John Locke

Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had.
Warren Lasher
Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano
Charles Deats or Keats
Alfonse
Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list. — Lorrie Moore