Quotes & Sayings About Not Waiting Around For A Man

The eight-man expedition was pinned down in a ferocious blizzard high on K2, waiting to make an assault on the summit, when a team member named Art Gilkey developed thrombophlebitis, a life-threatening altitude-induced blood clot. Realising that they would have to get Gilkey down immediately to have any hope of saving him, Schoening and the others started lowering him down the mountain's steep Abruzzi Ridge as the storm raged. At 25,000 feet, a climber named George Bell slipped and pulled four others off with him. Reflexively wrapping the rope around his shoulders and ice ax, Schoening somehow managed to single-handedly hold on to Gilkey and simultaneously arrest the slide of the five falling climbers without being pulled off the mountain himself. One of the more incredible feats in the annals of mountaineering, it was known forever after simply as The Belay. — Jon Krakauer

Man alone, it seems, lives all his life in the knowledge of death. And yet there is more to life than merely waiting for death. For life to have meaning, there must be a purpose. A man must pass something on - otherwise he is useless. "For most men that purpose revolves around marriage and children — David Gemmell

Me? Robin Goodfellow, a family man? He, not likely, ice-boy. I mean, think of what that would do to my reputation." Glamour shimmered around him, and he gave us a wink. "Later, lovebirds. Gimme a heads up when the kid arrives. 'Uncle Puck' will be waiting. — Julie Kagawa

She who ever had remained in the depth of my being, in the twilight of gleams and of glimpses; she who never opened her veils in the morning light, will be my last gift to thee, my God, folded in my final song.

Words have wooed yet failed to win her; persuasion has stretched to her its eager arms in vain.

I have roamed from country to country keeping her in the core of my heart, and around her have risen and fallen the growth and decay of my life.

Over my thoughts and actions, my slumbers and dreams, she reigned yet dwelled alone and apart.

many a man knocked at my door and asked for her and turned away in despair.

There was none in the world who ever saw her face to face, and she remained in her loneliness waiting for thy recognition — Rabindranath Tagore

A man who thinks that death is against life can never be non-violent. It is impossible. A man who thinks that death is the enemy can never be at ease, at home. That is impossible. How can you be at ease when the enemy is waiting for you any moment? It will jump on you and destroy you. How can you be non-tense when death is waiting just around the corner and the shadow of death is always falling on you? It can happen any moment. How can you rest when death is there? How can you relax? The enemy won't allow you to relax. — Rajneesh

See marriage as a man must, a good, sensible workaday institution; but awfully curbing to one's liberty. Somehow, after you're married forever, life has lost its feeling of adventure. There aren't any romantic possibilities waiting to surprise you around each corner. — Jean Webster

These waters are sacred to us and for you to be allowed to swim in these waters is a rare honour. What are you waiting for?"
Vartan turned to look at Trisa.
She winked at him and whispered, "Don't worry young man, I've seen it all before. You have nothing to be shy around me for."
"I wasn't ... " began Vartan, his cheeks reddening, "Never mind. — Peter Koevari

Jump, if you want to, 'cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you "fore you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out. I'm not saying this because I need a place to stay. That's the last thing I need. I told you, I'm a walking man, but I been heading in this direction for seven years. Walking all around this place. Upstate, downstate, east, west; I been in territory ain't got no name, never staying nowhere long. But when I got here and sat out there on the porch, waiting for you, well, I knew it wasn't the place I was heading toward; it was you. We can make a life, girl. A life. — Toni Morrison

We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home, passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn't sitting around waiting. She was busy. She still is. — Rebecca Solnit

She waved, laughing, waiting for him to go zooming past her. Instead he slowed, then came to a stop right in front of her.
"What are you doing?" she demanded, as he put his foot on the asphalt. She pointed to the finish line, a scant hundred yards away. "Go."
People around them started screaming. Josh ignored them all.
He pulled off his glasses. "How you doing?"
"Josh! This isn't funny. Move." She glanced over his shoulder, knowing the other racers would appear at any second. "Just finish. You can win. Then we'll talk."
"We can talk now."
She shrieked. "No! I said I was wrong. I said I loved you. What more do you want?"
"You," he said. "For always."
"Yes, yes. You can have that. Now go. Cross the finish line. It's right there. Can't see it? Hurry."
"You'll marry me?"
The man next to her turned. "For God's sake, lady. Marry him already. — Susan Mallery

I think that an anthill is better than a nest ... that in the anthill among a hundred thousand or a million you are freer than in a nest, where all sit around and look at one another, waiting until scientists finally discover ways to make us mind readers ... the psychology of the nest is loathsome to me, and I always sympathize with one who flees his nest, even if he flees into an anthill, where it may be crowded but one can find solitude - that most natural, most worthy state of man, that precious and intense state of being conscious of the world and of oneself. — Nina Berberova

Before she could answer, the waiter sprang at his chance to brush some crumbs from David's chair. He had been hanging around their table like a vulture, waiting for them to eat the last papadum crumb so he could take away the basket. He eyed the last piece sadly, as if it were the barrier between him and eternal happiness. Ginny grabbed it and shoved it in her mouth. The man looked relieved and took the basket but immediately returned to stare mournfully at their water glasses. — Maureen Johnson

A magnificient life is waiting just around the corner, and far, far away. It is waiting like the cake is waiting when there's butter, milk, flour and sugar. This is the realm of freedom. It is an empty realm. Here man's maginificent power over nature has left him alone with himself, powerless. It is the boredom of youth without a future. — Henri Lefebvre

I had been waiting to get Angus alone, and he appeared a little apprehensive about the occurrence when I discreetly said, 'Angus, my fine young man.' I smiled charmingly. Now he knew something was up, for certain. 'You wouldn't know how to build a bomb by any chance would you?'
He looked around sheepishly, 'Is this a trick question?'
I sighed impatiently, 'You're not going to get in trouble Angus.'
His shoulders dropped and he grinned wolfishly, 'Well in that case ... doesn't everyone? — Teresa Schulz

Alcenith Crawford (a divorced ophthalmologist): We women doctors have un-happy marriages because in our minds we are the superstars of our families. Having survived the hardship of medical school we expect to reap our rewards at home. We had to assert ourselves against all odds and when we finally graduate there are few shrinking violets amongst us. It takes a special man to be able to cope. Men like to feel important and be the undisputed head of the family. A man does not enjoy waiting for his wife while she performs life-saving operations. He expects her and their children to revolve around his needs, not the other way. But we have become accustomed to giving orders in hospitals and having them obeyed. Once home, it's difficult to adjust. Moreover, we often earn more than our husbands. It takes a generous and exceptional man to forgive all that. — Adeline Yen Mah

Already the ripening barberries are red
And the old asters hardly breathe in their beds.
The man who is not rich now as summer goes
Will wait and wait and never be himself.

The man who cannot quietly close his eyes
certain that there is vision after vision inside,
simply waiting for nighttime
to rise all around him in darkness-
it's all over for him, he's like an old man.

Nothing else will come; no more days will open
and everything that does happen will cheat him.
Even you, my God. And you are like a stone
that draws him daily deeper into the depths. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Oh, we women know things you don't know, you teachers, you readers and writers of books, we are the ones who wait around libraries when it's time to leave, or sit drinking coffee alone in the kitchen; we make crazy plans for marriage but have no man, we dream of stealing men, we are the ones who look slowly around when we get off a bus and can't even find what we are looking for, can't quite remember how we got there, we are always wondering what will come next, what terrible thing will come next. We are the ones who leaf through magazines with colored pictures and spend long heavy hours sunk in our bodies, thinking, remembering, dreaming, waiting for something to come to us and give a shape to so much pain. — Joyce Carol Oates

Seems like I've been waiting for you to come around my whole life, Lee. But a man can't wait forever and stay a man. — Rae Carson

It's not just the drive. They're right out front. Everywhere. Waiting for me. All day and night."
"Who are, dear?"
"Robots selling things. As soon as I set down the ship. Robots and visual-audio ads. They dig right into a man's brain. They follow people around until they die. — Philip K. Dick

It's that right now everyone is on their phones. Everyone has that 'me, me, me instant gratification' shit going on and so when the going gets rough in a relationship, as it always does, they bail. They bail because they have a million other people on their phone, on those fucking apps, all waiting for a hook-up or a date. A million people around the corner, with their perfect filtered photos uploaded, their bios updated and edited so they all represent the perfect fake versions of themselves. So even when you're on a date with one person, you can look at your phone and go to the next person, have your fun, then go to the next. It's not fucking dating man, it's shopping. — Karina Halle

Look around. The hantavirus is waiting for you. Ebola and the tropical rainforest is cooking up all kinds of brews to make sure that the population is kept in control. All these things are necessary. Why is there an increase in sexual deviance right now? Because it goes against procreative sex. Mother Nature does not want more children. This is not a time of birth. It is not a time to give birth, it's a time to die. The Bible says all things under heaven and that includes death as well as life. You out there, you comfortable ones, you point the finger. You say the junkie is the problem, you say the sexual deviant, serial killer, racist, and the man who hates his fellow man is the problem. But they ain't the problem. You're the problem. The sexual deviant, the murderer, the serial killer, the taker of human life is the cure, you're the problem. — Joe Coleman

Venice is a place where the past is still hanging around, waiting for an appointment with the future; but the future hasn't shown up. In the meantime it is a kind of no man's land, given up by default and occupied by irregulars and their dogs. — Jack Smith

Fishing is still elemental in the most elemental sense of the word - an activity composed of water and air and light and space, all arranged in precarious balance around a central idea of a man in a boat, waiting for a bite. — Samanth Subramanian

God is love,' they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. — Margaret Atwood

But chances are all around you. It is the mark of the kind of man I mean that he makes his own chances. You can't hold him back. I've never met him, and yet I seem to know him so well. There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done. It's for men to do them, and for women to reserve their love as a reward for such men. Look at that young Frenchman who went up last week in a balloon. It was blowing a gale of wind; but because he was announced to go he insisted on starting. The wind blew him fifteen hundred miles in twenty-four hours, and he fell in the middle of Russia. That was the kind of man I mean. Think of the woman he loved, and how other women must have envied her! That's what I should like to be, - envied for my man. — Arthur Conan Doyle

The king sleeps still, under a mountain , and around him is assembled
his warriors and his herds and his riches. By his right hand is his cup,
filled with possibility. On his breast nestles his sword, waiting, too, to wake.
Fortunate is the soul who finds the king and is brave enough to call him to wakefulness, for the king will grant him a favour, as wondrous as can be imagined by a mortal man. — Maggie Stiefvater

Last call. It was about that time. He'd probably been drinking liquid courage all night, waiting for his chance to hit on her. I had little choice in assuming he was a three-time loser with a wad-of-cash to wave around and a bozo smile to boot. About to prate his many accomplishments as a man of the world and his travels among the world's top markets. — Bruce Crown

The world was cruel and sudden. This he knew for sure. Relax for a moment, breathe in the scent of a rose, rest in the shade, pet a dog, take a sip of lemonade, fall in love with a dreamy-eyed girl or a haunted faced man, and you are just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Buzzing around the lemonade, you'll find flies. Follow the flies and you'll find death. — Kathy Hepinstall

When a man is drowning, it may be better for him to try to swim than to thrash around waiting for divine intervention. — William Sloane Coffin

I do what most women do. I meet someone and some of it's right, maybe he looks right, or has the right job, or the right background, and, instead of sitting back and waiting for him to reveal his other bits, I make them up. I decide how he thinks, how he's going to treat me, and, sure enough, every time I conclude that this time he's definitely my perfect man, and all of a sudden, well, not so suddenly perhaps, usually around six months after we've split up, I see that he wasn't the person I thought he was at all. — Jane Green

Always waiting, waiting to go up to the front line, waiting in the trenches with the whizzbags and shells bursting all around you, waiting for the whistle to send you out over the top and across No-Man's-Land, waiting for the bullet that had name on it. — Michael Morpurgo

People are always waiting around for that magical person who'll walk into their life and fix them, who'll offer up some vital piece they've been missing and make them complete. They spend years trying to fit their broken edges against another person's and call themselves whole and healed. The only problem with this, of course, is that expecting anyone else to fix you is an unequivocal disaster.

You can't wait for a man to come around and put you back together. You have to put yourself back together first, and become the kind of woman who deserves a good man. — Julie Johnson

One day - when the emperor had come to call on his uncle the cardinal - our worthy priest happened to be waiting as his Majesty went by. Noticing that the old man looked at him with a certain curiosity, Napoleon turned around and said brusquely, 'Who is this good man looking at me?'
'Sire,' replied M. Myriel, "you are looking at a good man, and I at a great one. May we both be the better for it."
That evening the emperor asked the cardinal the priest's name, Still later, M. Myriel was totally surprised to learn he had been appointed Bishop of Digne. — Victor Hugo

Take your clothes off."
"What?"
"You heard me."
Evelyn forced her mouth shut.
She looked around the room, buying time. The faded brown curtains hung limply over the windows, not quite touching, and the afternoon light filtered through the gaps, its beams turning the dust in the air into diamonds. She could hear the rattle of a wagon on the street below and the regular rhythm of squeaking bedsprings in the adjacent room.
"So? What are you waiting for?"
She stared at the man on the moth eaten chaise longue in front of her. He was serious. — Molly Ann Wishlade

They say true love only comes around once and you have to hold out and be strong until then. I have been waiting. I have been searching. I am a man under the moon, walking the streets of earth until dawn. There's got to be someone for me. It's not too much to ask. Just someone to be with. Someone to love. Someone to give everything to. Someone. — Henry Rollins

It's been my experience that every man has in him the possibility of doing well some one thing, no matter how humble, and that there's some one, in some place, who wants that special thing done. The difference between a fellow who succeeds and one who fails is that the first gets out and chases after the man who needs him, and the second sits around waiting to be hunted up. — George Horace Lorimer

Come with me." He led her to the beach again, but during dinner a few people had been busy. It was now lined with an aisle of candles. A man stood close to the breaking surf, hands crossed, waiting. Someone had used the surrounding sand as a canvas, creating a swirling pattern. Their names were part of the art.
What? She asked without a sound.
"I want you to marry me. Here. Now."
Beckett let go of her hand and strode away from her. When he turned around, close to the water at the end of the aisle, he hoped to hell she wasn't running in the other direction. — Debra Anastasia

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this. — Margaret Atwood

She lost twenty minutes sitting on the floor with her arms wrapped around her knees, smiling into the pretty glow and imagining herself a contented farmer's wife waiting for her man to come in from the fields. — Nora Roberts

My team of people around me, they were like, 'Don't be waiting and begging for a man.' You know what I'm saying? Like, 'Don't be desperate because you think having a boyfriend is going to be better. It might be harder with your career.' And then I was like, 'Yeah, you're right. I need to enjoy this. — Meghan Trainor

Forgiven people "prove" they're forgiven by walking in newness of life. They walk in the light, walk by faith, walk by the Spirit. Forgiveness sets us in motion. It acts upon us to make us act. It gets us up and gets us going. It does not indulge one more minute of lying around waiting for things to happen, waiting for others to do something, blaming others for the way I am. "Get up, take your mat, and go home." This getting up, taking our mat - once the symbol of our inability to move at all - and going home in full view of everyone is what every forgiven man and woman is supposed to do every day. When we're new creations, we act like it. — Mark Buchanan

Well, look at it this way," Robin reasoned as I sat with him and Geoff at their kitchen table that night, half-plastered from the pitcher of margarita they'd blended up. Was I going to have a tequila hangover in the morning? Oh, honey, you bet your sweet ass I was. And how many fucks did I give?
Not a one.
"Even if you were overreacting to read what you read into this guy's offer - which I don't think you were, though I doubt he actually thought it through enough to intend it to be read that way - you still have to ask yourself: What's in it for you, hanging around some motel room waiting for a married man to make a booty call? What benefit would you get out of that situation, or out of prolonging your relationship with him? He might not have meant it to be an insulting offer, but it was absolutely a one hundred percent selfish offer. There was no upside for you whatsoever, unless the sex really was just that amazing. — Amelia C. Gormley

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality. — Theodore L. Cuyler

At some signal, floodlights around the lip of the crater were switched on, and the bright earthlight was obliterated by a far more brilliant glare. In the lunar vacuum the beams were, of course, completely invisible; they formed overlapping ellipses of blinding white, centered on the monolith. And where they touched it, its ebon surface seemed to swallow them. Pandora's box, thought Floyd, with a sudden sense of foreboding - waiting to be opened by inquisitive Man. And what will he find inside? — Arthur C. Clarke

There was another pause, and Gansey realized she'd hung up. He leaned back against the fridge, eyes closed, guilty, comforted, wild, contained. In twenty-four hours, he'd be waiting for this again.
You know better you know better you know better
"What the hell, man?" Ronan said.
Gansey's eyes flew open just as Ronan hit the lights. He stood in the doorway, headphones looped around his neck, Chainsaw hulking like a tender thug on his shoulder. Ronan's eyes found the phone by Gansey's leg, but he didn't ask, and Gansey didn't say anything. Ronan would hear a lie in a second, and the truth wasn't an option. Jealousy had ruined Ronan for the first several months of Adam's introduction into their group; this would hurt him more than that. — Maggie Stiefvater

I'm dead, Makina said to herself when everything lurched: a man with a cane was crossing the street, a dull groan suddenly surged through the asphalt, the man stood still as if waiting for someone to repeat the question and then the earth opened up beneath his feet: it swallowed the man, and with him a car and a dog, all the oxygen around and even the screams of passers-by. I'm dead, Makina said to herself, and hardly had she said it than her whole body began to contest that verdict and she flailed her feet frantically backward, each step mere inches from the sinkhole, until the precipice settled into a perfect circle and Makina was saved. Slippery bitch of a city, she said to herself. Always about to sink back into the the cellar. — Yuri Herrera

It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic
love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men just wanted to focus on one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up. — Bonnie Jo Campbell