Old And Messy Quotes & Sayings

Can I stay?" The question broke Ashley Price's heart as she crouched in her messy foyer with her daughter in her arms. She clutched her five-year-old tighter as skinny little arms wrapped around her neck. "Very soon, okay?" Maddie - pink coat, pink boots, pink hat, pink gloves - pulled back and put on her poor-lost-puppy look. "Mo-om, you always say that. I'll be good. I'll be quiet when you paint. You won't even know I'm here. — Dana Marton

We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington's elites - politicians and intellectuals - miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely, and the challenges were stark, moral, and vital. Today's world is messy and complicated. China is one of our biggest trading partners and our looming geopolitical rival. Russia is a surly spoiler, but it has a globalized middle class and has created ties in Europe. — Fareed Zakaria

We were taught not to offer or invite aid, because, like it or not, helping is a messy, confused proposition; sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong, and sometimes you have no choice but to trust that the man holding your tire iron, cussing at your old lug nuts, is a deeply kind human after all. — Dee Williams

It'll be messy, but after a day you'll be zipping around as though you were a thousand years old again. — Eoin Colfer

She stands on the cliffs, near the old crumbling stone house. There's nothing left in the house but an upturned table, a ladle, and a clay bowl. She stands for more than an hour, goose-bumped and shivering. At these times, she won't confide in me. She runs her hands over her body, as if checking that it's still there, her heart pulsing and beating. The limbs are smooth and strong, thin and sinewy, her hair long and black and messy and gleaming despite her age. You wouldn't know it to look at her, that she's lived long enough to look for what's across the water. Eighty years later, and she is still fifteen. — Jodi Lynn Anderson

Genetic engineering was messy. To force a sequence of foreign DNA into a plant, you couldn't just snip the desired gene from the bacteria and sew it on to the plant's DNA sequence like an old woman working on a quilt. — Kenneth Eade

No." He caught her back to him, spreading his fingers over her uninjured cheek. "Listen. When you were twelve years old I saw you for the first time. Truly saw you. And from then on, I took note whenever our paths crossed. You were so quiet it was difficult to believe you sprang from the same messy bloodlines as the rest of us. You had modesty and grace. You didn't flirt, and you didn't give quarter." His palm slipped from her face; he took up both her hands. "If the other maidens of the shire were garish bright stars, then you were the midnight around them, silent and mysterious and all the more interesting for it. I accepted you as that, mouse. I still do."

-Kit — Shana Abe

I started to watch nameless men and women in the street. We were alike: none of us heroes, just ordinary people - extras - drifting through messy streets in a vast, messy Beijing. One morning, I went for a walk along the rubble-filled roads near my building. The area was being completely reconstructed. Three or four giant trucks had just arrived to start their demolition. Old buildings were going. Entire streets were going. In just one night all the food stalls had disappeared, along with the men from the countryside who used to run them. — Xiaolu Guo

The politics of that year [2004] are old now, but the problem remains the same, the real culture clash of American life. It's between the essence of fundamentalism - paternalism, authority, and charity - and the messy imperatives of democracy, "the din of the vox populi" once derided by Abram Vereide. It's the difference between false unity, preached from above, and real solidarity, pledged between brothers and sisters - the kinds who are always bickering. — Jeff Sharlet

Even as a 10-year-old, I remember trying to explain to my mother and stepfather how upset and frustrated a messy room made me. But they just couldn't grasp it. They wanted me to be playing with baseballs and frogs while I wanted to be scouring garage sales. — Nate Berkus

It never was about the musician or the instrument - it was about the laser notes in a hall of mirrors, the music itself. It was going to change the world for the better and it has. Maybe not as fast or as much as we wanted, but it has and it still will. Whether your name is Mozart, or Django Reinhardt, or Robert Johnson, or Jimi Hendrix, or whoever is next; who you are doesn't matter so long as you can open that conduit and let the music come through. It is the burning edge, whatever it sounds like and whoever is playing it. It is the noisy, messy, silly, invincible voice of life that comes through the LP on the turn-table, the transistor radio, or the Bose in your new Lexus that makes you want to get up out of whatever you are stuck in and dance. It is Dionysus and the Maenads all over again. No one can control it and I pity whoever tries. I am old now and only a house cat sunning herself in the window - but I was a tigress once, and I remember. I still remember. — G.J. Paterson

...to pick up an old-fashioned newspaper, ink barely dry, staining my fingers in that beautiful hue of grey that is messy and decadent at the same time. I lick to get to the Food section and the Arts and Entertainment section, my greedy little fingers wrapped around both the awkward pages of the dying art and my coffee mug as I curl into what I deem relaxation. — R.B. O'Brien

He was a noisy robust little man with a gleam of real talent concealed in the messy obscurity of his verse. But because he did his best to shock people with his monstrous mass of otiose words (he was the inventor of the "submental grunt" as he called it), his main output seems now so nugatory, so false, so old-fashioned (super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others) that his true value is only remembered by a few scholars who admire the magnificent translations of English poems made by him at the very outset of his literary career, - — Vladimir Nabokov

Now is the time of fresh starts
This is the season that makes everything new.
There is a longstanding rumor that Spring is the time
of renewal, but that's only if you ignore the depressing
clutter and din of the season. All that flowering
and budding and birthing--- the messy youthfulness
of Spring actually verges on squalor. Spring is too busy,
too full of itself, too much like a 20-year-old to be the best time for reflection, re-grouping, and starting fresh.
For that you need December. You need to have lived
through the mindless biological imperatives of your life (to bud, and flower, and show off) before you can see that a landscape of new fallen snow is THE REAL YOU.
December has the clarity, the simplicity, and the silence you need for the best FRESH START of your life. — Vivian Swift

Life is messy, Ren. It's not easy and it's definitely not for the timid. Everyone has a past. Things that stab them right between the eyes. Old grudges. Old shame. Regrets that steal your sleep and leave you awake until you fear for your own sanity. Betrayals that make your soul scream so loud you wonder why no one else hears it. In the end, we are all alone in that private hell. But life isn't about learning to forgive those who have hurt you or forgetting the past. It's about learning to forgive yourself for being human and making mistakes. Yes, people disappoint us all the time. But the harshest lessons come when we disappoint ourselves. When we put our trust and our hearts into the hands of the wrong person and they do us wrong. And while we may hate them for what they did, the one we hate most is ourself for allowing them into our private circle. How could I have been so stupid? How could I let them deceive me? We all go through that. It's humanity's brotherhood of misery. — Sherrilyn Kenyon