Misplaced Quotes & Sayings

Life is a storeroom filled with boxes, some empty, some misplaced forever. We're what remains, what we've grabbed hold of. — Margaret Mazzantini

In many languages, even the word for human being is "one who goes on migrations." Progress itself is a word rooted in a seasonal journey. Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey. — Gloria Steinem

You get a sense of reference there. You feel part of something that's got order and balance and harmony to it. All the distraction and noise, all the confusion of misplaced, misdirected energy just don't happen there. — Harrison Ford

Some people misunderstand evil and believe it will relent, and because their misplaced hope inspires dark hearts to dream darker dreams, they are the fathers and mothers of all wars. Evil does not relent; it must be defeated. And even when defeated, uprooted, and purified by fire, evil leaves behind a seed that will one day germinate and, in blooming, again be misunderstood. — Dean Koontz

Man's fatal flaw is misplaced optimism. — Allan Wolf

The war on drugs thrives on ignorance of drugs and misplaced faith in the power of the law to regulate human vice. — Tom Feiling

In recording from time to time some of the curious experiences and interesting recollections which I associate with my long and intimate friendship with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I have continually been faced by difficulties caused by his own aversion to publicity. To his sombre and cynical spirit all popular applause was always abhorrent, and nothing amused him more at the end of a successful case than to hand over the actual exposure to some orthodox official, and to listen with a mocking smile to the general chorus of misplaced congratulation. It was indeed this attitude upon the part of my friend and certainly not any lack of interesting material which has caused me of late years to lay very few of my records before the public. My participation in some of his adventures was always a privilege which entailed discretion and reticence upon me. — Arthur Conan Doyle

There have been times, what with this and that,
when the whisper of words was not enough.
On some shelf of memory lies a misplaced summer,
one not stored away for later savoring.
Surely it ended early, with unexpected fogs,
with the wind sliding past through unmeasured darkness.
No voice could be enough, what with this and that,
and the hours falling faster. — Paul Bowles

I come to oil country with a book about radicals who wish for the end of pipelines. But that's not what it's about. It's the friction point of prosperity and concern, ability and disability, the loss of bodily presence and the gain of ghost messages. It's misplaced outrage and well-placed courage. It's banjo song and smoke in your eye. Stories hinge there, swinging this way and that. — Kate Inglis

He was a stranger, an alien creature, impossible to reach or understand. And still she wanted to try. "Tell me what you need."
"This," he whispered, watching her lips move against his palm. "Just this." He rose over her, pinning her against the cushions, and stroked her hair with a tenderness that seemed misplaced among the sultry sensations it awakened in her.
"Do your clients pleasure you?" she asked hoarsely, her head tilting and following his fingers as they massaged her neck.
"If that's what they want. You pleasure me, Billie. The sight of you. The sound of your voice. I want to hear it all sorts of ways. Laughing. Whispering. Moaning. Crying out." He caught her mouth in a lush, hungry kiss, and there was nothing sweet or grateful about it this time. Erotic delight arrowed through her with each sleek thrust of his tongue between her lips, a sultry promise of what he would do to her if she let him. — Shelby Reed

How dare you belittle me this way?'
'What the hell are you talking about?'
'I have never, not even once in my life, given my love to another man. And you throw it back in my face like a trifle.'
'You misunderstand me. It is because I value your love so highly that I do not accept it.'
'You don't accept it because you don't want to accept it. You're mired in misplaced guilt and self-pity. — Julia Quinn

The embryological record, as it is usually presented to us, is both imperfect and misleading. It may be compared to an ancient manuscript, with many of the sheets lost, others displaced, and with spurious passages interpolated by a later hand ... Like the scholar with his manuscript, the embryologist has by a process of careful and critical examination to determine where the gaps are present, to detect the later insertions, and to place in order what has been misplaced. — Francis Maitland Balfour

It was a family joke that Lydia's domestic tendencies were somehow misplaced when she was created. — Lawana Blackwell

He told himself she wasn't really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when they wanted to be in the clear. — David Goodis

In living literature no person is a competent judge but of works written in his own language . I have expressed my opinion concerning a number of English writers; it is very possible that I may be mistaken, that my admiration and my censure may be equally misplaced, and that my conclusions may appear impertinent and ridiculous on the other side of the Channel. — Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand

Writing for the sake of writing, writing that draws its credibility from its very existence, is a foreign idea to most Americans. As a culture, we want cash on the barrel head. We want writing to earn dollars and sense so that it makes sense to us. We have a conviction - which is naive and misplaced - that being published has to do with being "good" while not being published has to do with being "amateur." ...
"Did you write today?"
"Yes."
"Then you're a writer today."
It would be lovely if being a writer were a permanent state that we could attain to. It's not, or if it is, the permanence comes posthumously.
A page at a time, a day at a time, is the way we must live our writing lives. Credibility lies in the act of writing. That is where the dignity is. That is where the final "credit" must come from. — Julia Cameron

Nay, you don't throw away those misplaced beads.. you find them, pick them up and make a new necklace.. probably not as beautiful as you imagined..but wearable nevertheless.. — Sanhita Baruah

We should bear the intelligence and taste of the architect or the gardener in how we shape the becoming of our self. Too much precision ("stringency") is simply misplaced, a formalism inappropriate to the kind of matter we have to deal with (and to be). — Kenny Smith

It's not that I had more important things to do or that I didn't want to help with whatever problems were interfering with her students being successful - rather, it's this horrible truth that life has taught me: misplaced hope is the most devastatingly painful thing you can give someone. — Tucker Elliot

Should we grieve over a little misplaced charity, when an all knowing, all wise Being showers down every day his benefits on the unthankful and undeserving? — Francis Atterbury

Ah? A small aversion to menial labor?" The doctor cocked an eyebrow. "Understandable, but misplaced. One should treasure those hum-drum tasks that keep the body occupied but leave the mind and heart unfettered. — Tad Williams

I've never seen a moon in the sky that, if it didn't take my breath away, at least misplaced it for a moment. — Colin Farrell

Such misplaced faith in a boy with a murderous past and a girl with treacherous intent. — Renee Ahdieh

I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys. — Mark Slouka

Do you trust me?
The question is usually asked before an admission that such trust is misplaced. — S.J. Watson

Outcasts, callused from being in exile for too long, learn to thrive on being the hated; the attention and infamy of our actions fuel us to become antiheroes. Too often do we forget: we risk self-destruction if we fail to follow what we know is right; our talents too often become misplaced, misdirected, misguided from what could have been something wonderful. — Mike Norton

Bill is about moving forward on a long overdue provision to protect vulnerable paid farm workers in Alberta to the same degree that they are protected in every other province in the country, and we feel confident that once people see how the bill actually applies to the regular family farm, they will see that a lot of the concerns were perhaps misplaced. And it's unfortunate that we created a situation that made people worry; that was not ever our intention. — Rachel Notley

So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong. There is no beauty in words except in their collocation. The effect of a fanciful word misplaced, is like that of a horn of exquisite polish growing on a human head. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's easy to not feel misplaced if this tidal wave of appreciation is coming your way. — Christoph Waltz

She was a poetry book with the wrong dust jacket, shelved in the Reference section. — Joyce Rachelle

I'm a misplaced American, but don't know where I was misplaced. — Ruby Wax

She needed a confessor! Would she find it there, in the world of the artists? All over the world they had their meeting places, their affiliations, their rules of membership, their kingdoms, their chiefs, their secret channels of communication. They established common beliefs in certain painters, certain musicians, certain writers. They were the misplaced persons too, unwanted at home usually, or repudiated by their families. But they established new families, their own religions, their own doctors, their own communities. — Anais Nin

She preferred fear to misplaced confidence. — Stephen Lloyd Jones

not everything green is gold. Not every finished puzzle is complete. And for every misplaced jigsaw, there is a puzzle out there still holding your space. Finally, after one search ends, a new one always begins. Always. — Paulette Benjamin

It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he's lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten? — Margaret Atwood

Both religiousness and lawlessness share the same problems: overconfidence and unrighteousness. "Why do bad things happen to good people?" we might ask - the very question that betrays our misplaced assumption that we somehow deserve a good life. — Tim Chaddick

We are lost; waiting tables at Denny's or forgetting ourselves stripping on poles, or working at a coffee shop misplaced in history or slowly dying on the inside as a secretary or landscaping lawns out of desperation working jobs with no futures, like bartending. The next generation of teachers, historians, lawyers, police officers and civil engineers work at this bar because the money can not be passed up, when you're drowning in debt. The world brings us to our knees and we service it because it nourishes us just enough to get by. We are tired and we don't understand why. We, the over educated searching for happiness at the bottom of the bottle. — Matthew Zorich

Enthusiasm and misplaced belief can take you a long way. — John Otway

There's nothing worse than misplaced optimism. — Charlie Cole

I am the very slave of circumstance And impulse borne away with every breath! Misplaced upon the throne misplaced in life. I know not what I could have been, but feel I am not what I should be let it end. — Lord Byron

Where will you go? What will you do?" he demanded.
"That need be no concern of yours
"
"The hell it isn't!" he shouted. "Everything about you is my concern."
She opened her mouth to deny this but the look of him stopped her. For a long tense moment he studied her and when he spoke his voice was low and furious and yearning.
"I don't give a bloody damn if I never share your bed, your name, or your house
you are still my concern. You can leave, take yourself from my ken, disappear for the rest of my life but you cannot untangle yourself from my
my concern. That I have of you, Miss Bede, for that, at least, I do not need your permission."
His words shocked her. She looked decades hence and she saw a specter of what might have been haunting her every moment, her every act, for the rest of her life.
"Your concern is misplaced."
"It's mine to misplace," he said steadily. — Connie Brockway

I did leave something behind with you: my heart. Of course, you didn't know it at the time. Maybe I didn't either. What have you done with my heart, Leo? Have you taken good care of it? Have you misplaced it? — Jerry Spinelli

I am very serious when I say this, beware of your dreams, for dreams make dangerous friends. We all have them - longings for a better life, a healthy child, a happy marriage, rewarding work. But dreams are, I have come to believe, misplaced longings. False lovers. Why? Because God is enough. Just God. And he isn't "enough" because he can make our dreams come true - no, you've got him confused with Santa or Merlin or Oprah. The God who created the universe is enough for us - even without our dreams. — Phil Vischer

The speaker over my head crackled,
"There has been a Bell-Atlantic pager misplaced. If anyone has found it, please make this known to a flight attendant."
It's under my left foot and you're never seeing it again. — Henry Rollins

It is the common error of builders and parents to follow some plan they think beautiful (and perhaps is so) without considering that nothing is beautiful that is misplaced. — Mary Wortley Montagu

In a sense our brains are like an archive, where material is well-preserved and properly catalogued, but also dissolves, or becomes re-shelved or misplaced, or in some cases never makes it there to begin with. — Clifton Crais

While words may be altered or censored, the truth endures, even when not properly recorded. Truth can be forgotten, misplaced, or lost, but never annihilated. — Jack Weatherford

Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. "You're my sacred ones," I told the books. "No one but me still cares about you. But I'm going to keep you with me forever. And one day I'll make you important again." I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell. — Gary Shteyngart

For days I kept imagining the fate of the world's misplaced letters. I started noticing them everywhere. All the right letters sitting on desks and dressers, slipped into purses, abandoned in email Draft folders, forever sealed and unsent. Shredded. Forgotten, sometimes intentionally. And the wrong letters, placed in someone else's hands - which, once delivered, may never be taken back. Emailed and immediately regretted. — Avi Steinberg

The desires our little family couldn't afford to indulge had never seemed important, only snobbish and silly and somehow misplaced, like Thurston Howell's priorities on Gilligan's Island. Besides, I'd had as much or more money than most kids I'd known in Brooklyn, if somewhat less than the majority of my Manhattan schoolmates at Stuyvesant, so figured I was somewhere in the middle. Yeah, sure, that was it: I was middle class. — Jonathan Lethem

I was bullied very badly in high school. I was a very successful kid. I sold my first company at a young age. There was a lot of misplaced rage in high school towards me. My brothers and sisters identified it as bullying, but I didn't at the time. — Charlie Ebersol

The U.S. berates China for its exchange rate policy, which Washington doesn't like. But one-sided pressure on China to change its exchange rate is misplaced. — Robert Mundell

I think it's not misplaced in 'Doctor Who' to have someone who is little bit edgy and maybe a little volatile and dangerous. — Peter Capaldi

But the passenger, having named the place he wants to go and knowing himself as helpless to act on the course of events as the dark box that encloses him, abandons himself to the pleasant feeling of being freed from all responsibility, or he ponders on what lies before him, or on what lies behind him, saying, Twill not be ever thus, and then in the same breath, But twas ever thus, for there are not five hundred different kinds of passengers. And so they hasten, the horse, the driver, and the passenger, towards the appointed place, by the shortest route or deviously, through the press of other misplaced persons. — Samuel Beckett

Jenny can still suck a golf ball through a garden hose and she guns my cock like a champ since she misplaced her false teeth! — Tara Sivec

That universal prayer which has been nervously whispered, spoken, chanted, shouted and even screamed towards the air in every known language and now misplaced dialect since time immemorial, Deliver us from evil, has never, and will never be answered. One cannot, after all, be 'delivered' from one's source. — John Zande

The candor was infectious. It spread back to the beginning of your life. You tried to tell her, as well as you could, what it was like being you. You described the feeling you'd always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn't worry quite so much about why. — Jay McInerney

Evil is, good or truth misplaced. — Mahatma Gandhi

I spent the rest of the workday on routine paperwork, snarling at misplaced files and seething at the stupidity of everyone else's report writing
when did Grammar die? — Jeff Lindsay

A fist in the face is all you deserve from love you've misplaced. — Rodney Crowell

A man of the best parts and greatest learning, if he does not know the world by his own experience and observation, will be very absurd, and consequently very unwelcome in company. He may say very good things; but they will be probably so ill-timed, misplaced, or improperly addressed, that he had much better hold his tongue. — Lord Chesterfield

Because who can describe the look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death? — John Irving

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing- persons reports, then moved on themselves. — Joan Didion

If a misplaced admiration shows imbecility, an affected criticism shows vice of character. Expose thyself rather to appear a beast than false. — Denis Diderot

[I]t doesn't matter whom you love or where you move from or to, you always take yourself with you. If you don't know who you are, or if you've forgotten or misplaced her, then you'll always feel as if you don't belong. Anywhere. (xiii) — Sarah Ban Breathnach

We cannot keep our eyes focused on Jesus while our greed lusts for worldly security. We may go through the motions, but eventually the misplaced priority of worldliness will corrode the soul's joy. — Tony Reinke

Like a child at bedtime who insists she's not tired, Celia's provocation was all unproductive, almost self-negating. Sometimes I thought this was just her scorpion nature, but other times it seemed to me that she had settled on this pose purposefully, out of some dimly perceived, horribly misplaced idea that the job of an artist was to hide her light under the darkest bushel possible and wait for a dedicated acolyte to be drawn to it like a clairvoyant moth. — Rachel Pastan

The devil considers all misplaced trust as devil worship, for he hides himself in its shadows. — Bill Johnson

Was Adam safe? Was any child, even his own dearest Anna, ever free from danger? As soon as a son or daughter was placed in the care of others a parent had made an act of trust. If that was misplaced or mistaken, it could soon come to be seen as carelessness or neglect. Perhaps being a parent was to live in a state of constant fear, where the cost of the freedom of youth lay in the anxiety of those who protected it? Because — James Runcie

Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn't the gods made them with the most vulnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted. — Stephen King

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Civilization needs a new operating system. — Paul Hawken

A lot of these American actors have this - in my view - misplaced view that they have to look like Action Man. The trouble is, they all run the risk of being interchangeable. — Damian Lewis

With wisdom comes responsibility. Somewhere along the way, I misplaced both. — I.E. Castellano

We ourselves are the substance we withdraw to, not from, as we pull our overextended and misplaced creative energy back into our own core. — Julia Cameron

THE SUN HAD just crested on the horizon like a misplaced planet, swollen and molten and red, lighting a landscape that seemed sculpted out of clay and soft stone and marked by the fossilized tracks of animals with no names, when a tall barefoot man wearing little more than rags dropped his horse's reins and eased himself off the horse's back and worked his way down an embankment into a riverbed chained with pools of water that glimmered as brightly as blood in the sunrise. — James Lee Burke

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home. — James Baldwin

There are doubtless those who would wish to lock up all those who suspected of terrorist and other serious offences and, in the time-honored phrase, throw away the key. But a suspect is by definition a person whom no offence has been proved. Suspicions, even if reasonably entertained, may prove to be misplaced, as a series of tragic miscarriages of justice has demonstrated. Police officers and security officials can be wrong. It is a gross injustice to deprive of his liberty for significant periods a person who has committed no crime and does not intend to do so. No civilized country should willingly tolerate such injustices. — Tom Bingham

You will be someone else if you did not answer the question "Who am I — Sunday Adelaja

Imagine a very long time passing - and I find my way out, following someone who already knows how to leave Hell. And God says to me on Earth for the first time, "Xas!" in a tone of discovery, as if I'm a misplaced pair of spectacles or a stray dog. And he puts it to me that he wants me in Heaven. But Lucifer has doubled back - it was him I followed - to find me, where I am, in a forest, smitten, because the Lord has noticed me, and I'm overcome, as hopeless as your dog Josie whom you got rid of because she loved me.' Xas glared at Sobran. Then he drew a breath - all had been said on only three. He went on: 'Lucifer says to God the He can't have me. And at this I sit up and tell Lucifer that I didn't even think he knew my name, then say to God no thank you - very insolent this - and that Hell is endurable so long as the books keep appearing. — Elizabeth Knox

Loyalty is important, one of the most important character traits we can have. But loyal love does not mean infinite and/or misplaced responsibility for another's life, nor does it mean that one forever puts up with mistreatment out of inappropriate loyalty. — Henry Cloud

As the surface of the seashore rocks were pitted by by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath, so time made truth of what appeared to be. The days that passed, in becoming weeks, still did not disturb the surface an assumption had created. The weather of a beautiful summer continued with neither sign nor hint that credence had been misplaced. The single sandal found among the rocks became a sodden image of death; and as the keening on the pier at Kilauran traditionally marked distres brought by the sea, so did silence at Lahardane. — William Trevor

Haile Selassie was not an evil man, but his priorities were misplaced. He was so concerned with establishing a strong central government and modernizing the country that he failed to meet the challenge of natural disaster ... It was his false pride, this lack of courage to admit mistakes, that brought about his downfall. — Haile Selassie

with you, the sense i have lost my place in a book
or simply lost - misplaced the memory
which isn't in the last place where I looked.
a thought that the clouds don't move - that it is we
who thunder past - there it is! an old vacation,
a train ride - sense of immobility.
as sky and forest scroll past in relation,
we are not moved, pretend to love the view,
resort at length to scripted conversation
by a poet-turned-screenwriter who
didn't want this job, career gone grossly wrong
and now drafts action film scripts wholly two-
dimensional unless you choose to don
the 3d glasses that do not stay on - — Joshua Ip

How without mercy and without blame we have all of us been. And how careless to have misplaced so much. — Anna Smaill

When we speak, dress, and think like others, we live with the goal of achieving the approval they have — Sunday Adelaja

This is Winter," said Scarlet. "Princess Winter."
Thorne guffawed and pushed a hand into his hair. "Are we running a boardinghouse for misplaced royalty around here, or what? — Marissa Meyer

There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole. — Marilynne Robinson

Lost means forever, it's gone. But misplaced ... that means it's still around, somewhere. — Sarah Dessen

The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection. — Kay Ryan

Self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with printed matter seems misplaced. — Ursula K. Le Guin

What can I say, I'm a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unourned, well, you get the drift. — Mark Z. Danielewski

I wondered when I would stop feeling like such a clueless twit for that misplaced trust. — Tammara Webber

Ignorance is avoiding that which stands in front of me out of the misplaced hope that it will put what I'm ignoring behind me. Instead, it's most certain to drop it on top of me. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

I'm a pathetic haggler and often give more than the original price out of a misplaced sense of duty. — Joanna Lumley

I lost my wife twenty years ago. Sometimes I feel as if I have lived without her for a decade, and sometimes I feel as though I lost her just a minute before.

I write lost, but I have grown to hate that expression. She was not a set of keys or a hat. Losing her is the equivalent of saying that I have misplaced my lungs. — Cath Crowley

One of the great dangers in political engagement is misplaced hope. — Shane Claiborne

In the euphoria after the Cold War, there was a misplaced notion that the UN could solve every problem anywhere. — Atal Bihari Vajpayee

Monkeys"
"You can buy cooler, more humdrum pets
a monkey deprived of his mother in the cradle
feels the want of her affection so keenly
he either pines away or masters you
by literally hanging on your neck
no ounce of your patience or courage is misplaced;
the worst is his air of boredom and neglect,
manifested in tail-chewing and fur plucking.
The whole species is vulnerable to killing colds,
likes straw, hay or bits of a torn blanket,
a floortray thinly covered with sawdust,
they need trapezes, shelves, old rubber tires
any string or beam will do to set them swinging
these charming youngsters tend to sour with age — Robert Lowell

ROSALIND: I would we could do so, for her benefits are mightily misplaced, and the bountiful blind woman doth most mistake in her gifts to women. — William Shakespeare

Prayer is not an act I perform, words I recite, a behavior I strive to maintain. It is a returning. It is a broken life finding healing, a misplaced soul recognizing home. — Micha Boyett