Retracing Quotes & Sayings

My M.O. is just do what you do and don't feel like you have to make apologies for it. I'm sure there will come a point when I have to apologize for something, but not yet. — Adam Lambert

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude. — Jonathan Franzen

Retracing the various episodes of one's life, one is disconcerted to discover that one was not as noble as one thought oneself at the time. — Phyllis Bentley

We were walking that tightrope between friends and something more ... — Melissa Aragon

No one could tell you: you just had to go through it on your own. If you were lucky, you came out on the other side and understood. If you didn't, you kept getting thrust back, retracing those steps, until you finally got it right. — Sarah Dessen

On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan. — Herman Melville

No matter how cleverly we disguise our anxieties they bear witness to the imperfect nature of the human heart. To be is to become. To become is not to be. We are a work-in-progress, incomplete, imperfect, unrealised, and by virtue of temporal actions, temporary - a verb more than a noun, an inner quest and an outward odyssey framed by metaphors, like Escher's "Print Gallery"; we make the endless journey round the pictures, retracing our steps in forgetfulness, avoiding but mindful of the space where there are no pictures, where there is no gallery, where there is nothing at all. And like flies in a fly bottle, trapped by a failure of vision, we go round and round and round the moebius loop of a print gallery of our own making, a picture inside a picture inside a picture, forever. — Billy Marshall Stoneking

The great advantage of our system of government over all others, is, that we have a written constitution, defining its limits, and prescribing its authorities; and that, however, for a time, faction may convulse the nation, and passion and party prejudice sway its functionaries, the season of reflection will recur, when calmly retracing their deeds, all aberrations from fundamental principle will be corrected. — Henry Clay

We are retracing the lines and windows that are no longer there. We are rebuilding from our memory, trying to do with our eyes open what we usually do with our eyes closed. — David Levithan

Back up," I said. "What did Sam mean by again? You've lost your hammer before?" "Once," Thor said. "Okay, twice. Three times if you count this time, which you shouldn't, because I am not admitting that the hammer is missing." "Right ... " I said. "So how did you lose it?" "I don't know!" Thor started to pace again, his long red hair sparking and popping. "It was just like ... Poof! I tried retracing my steps. I tried the Find My Hammer app, but it doesn't work! — Rick Riordan

There is no retracing our steps. — Horace

Irresponsibility, cowardice, personal vanity, whining and chaos are becoming the maxims of political action. There is a stink in Berlin - a huge one! — Edmund Stoiber

We go eastward to realize history, and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethan stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions. — Henry David Thoreau

Behind us, our paths stretch, long and worn deep. There is bitter pathos in the prospect of retracing them. Yet, for those of us who remain ... awake, it seems we do nothing but just that. An endless retracing of paths, yet each step we take is forward, for the path has proved itself to be a circle. Yet- and here is the true pathos- the knowledge never slows our steps.
"Wide-eyed stupid", the Malazans say. — Steven Erikson

How can a nation nourished on diversity
breed its own shamanic tradition without retracing its steps to its varied ancestors? — S. Kelley Harrell

I'm a fan of retracing the facts and absorbing my atmosphere and being influenced by it. — Lindi Ortega

There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. — Edgar Allan Poe

'Walking the Bible' describes the year that I spent retracing the five books of Moses through the desert, and I was actually working on a follow-up, which would look at the rest of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. — Bruce Feiler

But the most reliable indication of the future of Open Source is its past: in just a few years, we have gone from nothing to a robust body of software that solves many different problems and is reaching the million-user count. There's no reason for us to slow down now. — Bruce Perens

It's hard, but sometimes it is better to have no friends for a time than to have the wrong friends. The wrong group can lead you down all kinds of paths you really don't want to be on. And retracing your steps can be a long and hard journey — Sean Covey

Sometimes I imagine a surveyor 100 years from now reading my plan, retracing my boundaries, and finding the monuments that I set. It's an honor to make a mark in history like that. — Mark Mason

The errors of a wise man are literally more instructive than the truths of a fool. The wise man travels in lofty, far-seeing regions; the fool in low-lying, high-fenced lanes; retracing the footsteps of the former, to discover where he diviated, whole provinces of the universe are laid open to us; in the path of the latter, granting even that he has not deviated at all, little is laid open to us but two wheel-ruts and two hedges. — Thomas Carlyle

Liberty is an old fact; it has had its heroes and its martyrs in almost every age. As I look back through the vista of centuries, I can see no end of the ranks of those who have toiled and suffered in its cause, and who wear upon their breasts its stars of the legion of honor. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Seek for a fresh invoice of grace. Unbelief can scoff or growl; faith is the nightingale that sings in the darkest hour. Faith can draw honey out of the rock and oil out of the flint. With Christ in possession and heaven in reversion, it marches to the time of the One-hundred-and-third Psalm over the roughest road, and against the most cutting blast. — Theodore L. Cuyler

Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her other works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an independent intelligence she acts for him. But the very fact that constitutes him a man is that he does not remain stationary, where nature has placed him, that he can pass with his reason, retracing the steps nature had made him anticipate, that he can convert the work of necessity into one of free solution, and elevate physical necessity into a moral law. — Friedrich Schiller