Penultimate Quotes & Sayings

I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another. — Nicole Krauss

And here I was at the end of my trip, with everything just as fuzzy and unreal as the beginning. It was easier for me to see myself in Rick's lens, riding down to the beach in that cliched sunset, just as it was easier for me to stand with my friends and wave goodbye to the loopy woman with the camels, the itching smell of the dust around us, and in our eyes the feat that we had left so much unsaid. There was an unpronounceable joy and an aching sadness to it. It had all happened too suddenly. I didn't believe this was the end at all. There must be some mistake. Someone had just robbed me of a couple of month in there somewhere. There was not so much an anticlimactic quality about the arrival at the ocean, as the overwhelming feeling that I had somehow misplaced the penultimate scene. — Robyn Davidson

The more you say no the more people ask. — Thomas Mars

The three Divine are in this hierarchy, First the Dominions, and the Virtues next;
And the third order is that of the Powers. The in the dances twain penultimate
The Principalities and Archangels wheel; The last is wholly of angelic sports.
These orders upward all of them are gazing,
And downward so prevail, that unto God
They all attracted are and all attract. — Dante Alighieri

White folks hear the blues come out, but they don't know how it got there. — Ma Rainey

Are you who I think you are? — Lemony Snicket

Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement. — Edward Dahlberg

A tiny change today brings a dramatically different tomorrow. — Richard Bach

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art. — Oscar Wilde

It isnot good enough tospend time and ink indescribing the penultimate sensations and physical movements of people getting into a state of rut, we all know them so well. — John Galsworthy

Writing complex characters is the penultimate exercise in empathy. — Kevin Focke

And no one moans: there is no anguish. Only our nocturnal silence when we crawl on all fours toward the fires that someone has lit for us at a mysterious hour and with incomprehensible finality. We're guided by fate, though we've left nothing to chance. A writer must resemble a censor, our elders told us, and we've followed that marvelous thought to its penultimate consequence. A writer must resemble a newspaper columnist. A writer must resemble a dwarf and MUST survive. If we didn't have to read too, our work would be a point suspended in nothingness, a mandala pared down to a minimum of meaning, our silence, our certainty of standing with one foot dangling on the far side of death. Fantasies. Fantasies. In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats. Castrated cats wedded to cats with slit throats. — Roberto Bolano

Joy and sorrow are the light and shade of life; without light and shade no picture is clear. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

Success is such a relative thing for me. I'm fundamentally a Christian which means that ultimately all of the penultimate titles and things you just had to wear with a loose garment. Really. — Cornel West

If myth is translated into literal fact, then myth is a lie. But if you read it as a reflection of the world inside you, then it's true. Myth is the penultimate truth. — Joseph Campbell

He had found it hard to equate the priest's God with the one who had left his mother to die slowly and painfully. — John Connolly

Every time there's a list of the 100 greatest records of all time, all those albums were recorded in two days. Hardly any of them took a year, I'll tell you. In this day and age, I think it's important that people know that. — Jack White

If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that it has a circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon. — Bill Bryson

It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth - penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images, — Joseph Campbell

I wrote 'Mr. In-Between' very quickly when I was about 23. I wrote the penultimate chapter, then realised I'd done something which was written to the best of my abilities. I panicked. I hesitated to finish the final chapter and went into withdrawal for three years. I decided to pick it up again after I went drinking with author Tim Binding. — Neil Cross

There is a fundamental reason why we look at the sky with wonder and longing - for the same reason that we stand, hour after hour, gazing at the distant swell of the open ocean. There is something like an ancient wisdom, encoded and tucked away in our DNA, that knows its point of origin as surely as a salmonid knows its creek. Intellectually, we may not want to return there, but the genes know, and long for their origins - their home in the salty depths. But if the seas are our immediate source, the penultimate source is certainly the heavens.
The spectacular truth is - and this is something that your DNA has known all along - the very atoms of your body - the iron, calcium, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and on and on - were initially forged in long-dead stars. This is why, when you stand outside under a moonless, country sky, you feel some ineffable tugging at your innards. We are star stuff. Keep looking up. — Gerald D. Waxman

Usually when I mention suspended animation, people will flash me the Vulcan sign and laugh. — Mark Roth

October 1976 was the penultimate performance of Bench's Hall of Fame career. All the early success and awards and accolades thrown in his direction had prepared him for this moment - when the Big Red Machine became a dynasty by defending it's World Championship from the season before. — Tucker Elliot

Hats are the epitome of Englishness, and a royal wedding is the penultimate moment for a hat designer. I'm Irish, but I am a royalist and I believe in fantasy. — Philip Treacy

And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his 'Every Change Is for the Worse' should he ever find time to write it: Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there. — Joseph Heller

As human beings we are divided into two categories. Those who make a difference and those whose lives are made different by those who fight for change. If you're part of the former then you better be prepared for a long hard road. People will fight you, condemn you, judge you and scoff at you; the majority will applaud the status quo but remember that it's the minority who change the rules and, in doing so, progress mankind towards its penultimate goal: a world where we reign in either good or evil. Choose your side. — Sarah Brownlee

This is space. It's sometimes called the final frontier.
(Except that of course you can't have a final frontier, because there'd be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it's pretty penultimate ... ) — Terry Pratchett

Technology is the penultimate chameleon, taking on the characteristics of its handler. In some hands technology is a tool of treachery, while in others it morphs into a peaceful protest. In still others, it represents the bleeding edge of freedom. — Brock N. Meeks

One of the challenges was to make a cinematic movie about literally talking heads and to try to make it feel like something you want to see in a theater. — Morgan Neville

Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth
penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told. — Joseph Campbell

Singles, too, must see the penultimate status of marriage. If single Christians don't develop a deeply fulfilling love relationship with Jesus, they will put too much pressure on their DREAM of marriage, and that will create pathology in their lives as well. — Timothy Keller

So you're a real person! I always thought you were a legendary figure, like unicorns or Giuseppe Verdi. — Lemony Snicket