Mulling It Over Quotes & Sayings

The vending machines hummed softly, as though mulling over some grave decision... — Dean Koontz

The purpose of problems is to push you toward obedience to God's laws, which are exact and cannot be changed. We have the free will to obey them or disobey them. Obedience will bring harmony, disobedience will bring you more problems. — Peace Pilgrim

There's a lot going on I don't have a clue about, I wrote; I'll try my damnedest to figure it all out, but you've got to undertsand these things take time. I have no idea where I'm headed - all I know for sure is I don't want to get hung up thinking too deeply about things. The world's too precarious a place for that. Start me mulling over ideas and I'll en up forcing people to do things they hate. I couldn't stand that. — Haruki Murakami

I reached out and stroked the dark layers of his hair. I felt oddly bashful as I asked, "Do you want to spend the night with me, or would you rather - "
"Yes."
A crooked grin spread across my face. "You want some time to think about it?"
"Okay." He squinted thoughtfully as if mulling it over, and a split second later, he said, "Yes."

-Ella & Jack — Lisa Kleypas

What have you done? (Apollymi)
Mulling mostly coupled with a shot or two of reminiscing and a drop of regretting a few past decisions. Some might even call it moping, but I'd kill anyone so stupid as to suggest that of me. (Stryker) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Everyone asks me how I got started into writing. I wish I had some cool story to tell, but the truth is pretty lame. My wife and I were having a drink on our back porch and I mentioned a concept I'd been mulling over. She suggested that I write it down, and so I figured I'd make a few notes and get it out of my system. No matter how I tried though, it just wouldn't let me write it in any other way than a story. Believe me when I say I tried, but 63,000 words later I realized that I needed a chart to track the plot and personas to maintain character consistency. So I just gave up and let it write itself from that point on.

As far as I'm concerned now, I'm just hanging on and trying to keep up. — Jason Faris

What did it clarify for you?" Pinky asked.
Mrs. Brown laughed. "Told me to keep doing and saying what I dam well please, and not be bamboozled by anyone. Life is too short - no mulling things over for a dozen years or so. What about you?"
"I wasn't on the ship — Kate Alcott

Hello, Halberstam," Owen says, walking by.
Hello, Owen," I say, admiring the way he's styled and slicked back his hair, with a part so even and sharp it ... devastates me and I make a mental note to ask him where he purchases his hair-care products, which kind of mousse he uses, my final guesses after mulling over the possibilities being Ten-X. — Bret Easton Ellis

Often the best parts of life were when you
weren't doing anything at all, just mulling it over,
chewing on it. I mean, say you figure that everything
is senseless, then it can't be quite senseless
because you are aware that it's senseless and your
awareness of senselessness almost gives it a sense.
You know what I mean? An optimistic pessimism. — Charles Bukowski

I understand true life doesn't happen when I constantly gaze backwards, mulling over all the injustices others have done or I have done to others. — Mary E. DeMuth

Shelby looked over to see Andrew silently mouthing syllables to himself, as if he were part of an ecstatic rite. He grinned as he bit fricatives and tongued plosives. He was tasting English origins, mulling over words ripped from bronze-smelling hoards. Words that had slept beneath centuries of dust and small rain, sharp and bright as scale mail. Poetry had never moved her quite so much as drama. She loved the shock of colloquy, the beat and treble of words doing what they had to on stage. Andrew preferred the echo of poems buried alive. — Bailey Cunningham

I start by mulling a question and before I know it, a whole drama is unfolding in my head. Often, an idea sticks before I know what I'm going to do with it. — Jodi Picoult

Frustration was my constant companion. I wanted to scream. What the he-eck are we supposed to do now? I asked Fang.
He looked at me, and I could tell he was mulling over the problem. He held out a small waxed-paper bag.
Peanut? — James Patterson

Acknowledging your mistakes also has its pluses, but we often don't have trouble recalling or mulling over those. The point is, if you don't acknowledge your successes the same way you acknowledge your mistakes, you're sure to have a memory full of blunders. — Jack Canfield

Worry is a useless mulling over of things we cannot change. — Peace Pilgrim

Hello." The doctor speaks softly, nervously. Mr White doesn't respond, not even the slightest change of expression. Dr Archer has been thinking. Mulling it over in his head, endlessly, driving himself more insane he thinks than any unfortunate in his care, crazy with this longing. He is afraid of spiders, he watches the clouds, he held up two fingers; he is lucid. He came to me of his own free will; he shares these terrible feelings. — John T. Fuller

Get inside before I spank you in public.
There it was again, another of his maddening threats. Did that mean he wouldn't spank her if she did as he said or that he simply planned to spank her in private? She was still mulling over the whole unpleasant concept when he started the truck. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Yeah, we call that mulling around. Okay guys, come on now. What we're going to do early in this game is mull around, okay? And later, we're going call that monkey-off-our-back play. — Les Miles

The battle to be satisfied is a battle of focus. We often spend our time mulling over what we don't have instead of considering the benefits of what we already possess. To walk in a place of contentment, there are two things you have to do: Focus on the good aspects of what you already have. Stop thinking about what you don't have. — Carrie Rocha

I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it. — Andrea Seigel

My dad in particular I tend to use - I call him 'The Brain.' If he's accessible, I'd rather put it through his brain. My wife, Melissa, maintains that the closer he is in proximity to me, the less I think for myself. And I think she's actually correct. So anything worth mulling over, I will mull over with my father, and that includes ratings. — Joshua Malina

The first thing we have to do," I told Luke the next day, "is find a nice place we can rent or sublet. Should we focus on the downtown area? Montrose? Or would you be open to finding something close by in Sugar Land? We could always go to Austin, but we'd have to take care to avoid you-know-who. And it's a lot more expensive to rent in Austin."
Luke looked contemplative, sucking slowly on the bottle as if he were mulling the possibilities.
"Are you thinking it over?" I asked him. "Or are you working on another dirty diaper?"
-Ella & Luke — Lisa Kleypas

No, of course not,' he agreed in a tone that implied he'd heard both the words I'd said and the words I hadn't said and would be mulling them over later on his own. — Timothy Zahn

People have found inner peace by losing themselves in a cause larger than themselves. Finding inner peace means coming from the self-centered life into the life centered. — Peace Pilgrim

Worry is useless mulling over of things we cannot change. Worry is not concern, which would motivate you to do everything possible in a situation. — Peace Pilgrim

Many of us spend long minutes in the aisle of the drugstore mulling over what toothpaste to buy. Yet most of us don't spend any time at all thinking about what species of animal we eat and why. Our choices as consumers drive an industry that kills ten billion* animals per year in the United States alone. If we choose to support this industry and the best reason we can come up with is because it's the way things are, clearly something is amiss. — Melanie Joy

Mulling this over, Vlad wiped her lip gloss from his lips with the back of his hand.Vampires, after all, didn't sparkle. — Heather Brewer

The problem with too beautiful a view is that it's alright for the mulling stage. But for the writing stage, you want to be somewhere without a view, especially if it is very different from what you're writing. — Vikram Seth

My life has certainly had its share of remarkable patterns, symmetries and asymmetries, coincidences that have left me wondering on the ground just what my life looks like from a distance - seen from the air, does it reveal a scheme? I have heard myself mulling over this question many times while growing up. But now that I'm well into middle age and have reached the age my mother was when one son's illness ensnared a second one, I look down from the air and am astonished at the landscape. — Yarrott Benz

Viviane considered herself a rational woman.She was a Virgo. She was used to solving problems , even if it meant she spent far too much time mulling things over in the bathtub. This didn't make any sense; when she tried to envision her life without Jack or his without her , all she could think about were platypuses.What was a platypus but a kind of duck with fur?The whole idea of it was ridiculous and wrong. — Leslye Walton

[Margaret] went to a talk on parenting at the end of the school year where the speaker had said that doing good things, charitable things, was actually a selfish act, because it made you feel good. She has been mulling that ever since. Should she do something selfless, something good? Should she reach out to someone who really needs her forgiveness? Would this make her feel better? — Janice Y.K. Lee

Clyde's mother was an ample, olive-dark woman with the worn and disappointed look of someone who had spent her life doing things for others: occasionally the mulling plaintiveness of her voice suggested that she regretted this. — Truman Capote