Quotes & Sayings About Standing By Someone

Another time, he blew up his house in Bel Air. Someone was doing drugs there and they left the ether open. The fumes are like wavy cartoon lines; they find fire and then the fire follows the fumes back to the source and explodes. When it's going critical, you can hear it go up in a whistle. Sly was back in a corner of his house, in a bathroom, and the ether had drifted from the kitchen. When he lit the pipe, it blew up the part of the house he was in - it was an addition, and it separated from the rest of the structure. When the smoke cleared, the bathroom had fallen clean off. He was standing on the edge of the house as cars drove by. He was standing on a ledge about six inches wide, with the door heading into the kitchen right next to him. He slid back into the house, closed the door, and stayed like that for more than a year. — George Clinton

There wasn't much that scared her. She was the strongest person I'd ever known. And I'm not talking about the kind of strength that's measured by the number of reps someone can perform. I'm talking about being fearless. About standing up for yourself. About not caring what people think. — Elizabeth Eulberg

The problem is that people have tried to look away from space and from the meaning of the moon landing. I remember seeing a picture of an astronaut standing on the moon. It was up at Yale and someone has scrawled on it, 'So what?' That is the arrogance of the kind of academic narrowness one too often sees; it is trapped in its own predictable prejudices, its own stale categories. It is the mind dulled to the poetry of existence. It's fashionable now to demand some economic payoff from space, some reward to prove it was all worthwhile. Those who say this resemble the apelike creatures in 2001. They are fighting for food among themselves, while one separates himself from them and moves to the slab, motivated by awe. That is the point they are missing. He is the one who evolves into a human being; he is the one who understands the future. — Joseph Campbell

Gabriel came out a moment later, while Kaitlyn was still standing motionless by the stairs. He was shrugging into his T-shirt. He looked particularly handsome in a just-roused, early morning way. His hair was very wavy, as if someone had run fingers through it to release the curl, his eyes were hooded and lazy and there was a faint smile of satisfaction on his lips.
Kaitlyn discovered that she wanted to kill him. The image that came to her mind was of hitting him with a rolling pin, but not in an amusing, comic-book sort of way. — L.J.Smith

I use the example as computed by the mathematician Michael Berry. If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more complicated, but possible; you need to be more careful about your knowledge of the initial states, and more precision is called for. The problem is that to correctly predict the ninth impact, you need to take into account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table (modestly, Berry's computations use a weight of less than 150 pounds). And to compute the fifty-sixth impact, every single elementary particle of the universe needs to be present in your assumptions! — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Never forget that you are a [child] of God. He loves you. Live by your standards. Stand up for what you believe in. Sometimes it is not easy, and you may be standing alone for a while. Look for friends with integrity and character, then go to them and express appreciation for their examples. You might even find someone who has been feeling as lonely as you. Pray for guidance and protection from the Lord. He will sustain you. He will become a trusted friend, and you will discover that your example will attract many friends who will take courage from your strength of character. — W. Craig Zwick

When I live in the age of miracles," Allan said, "your mother was the greatest miracles of all. Just by standing near me she made me better than I am. she brought out that in me that makes me best. I'd think, I don't deserve her, and then I'd think again and say, wait, yes I do.Because her mere presence made me become someone who deserved her love. Do you see? — Dexter Palmer

When you say, "History is written by the winners," you like to think about someone who isn't you. You want to think, "Oh, that's the juggernaut I'm standing against." But you're probably part of it. — Daniel Handler

I don't see the point in apologizing to someone who remains angry enough to throw me off a cliff ... unless we are standing by a cliff. — Wes Fesler

Linked together as a team with one goal, we soon realized we were only as strong as our weakest link. But did we condemn the weaker
member? That wouldn't serve any purpose. Instead, the stronger guys responded by carrying more weight than the weaker teammate. Encouragement was key in reaching the top of the stadium, standing as one.
Sometimes one person on your team may not be as strong as another. Strengths usually differ. Likewise, in an encounter with another, someone may have a different set of beliefs or ideas.To accomplish any goal, embracing the strengths and weaknesses of each member and compensating where necessary are the best ways to make it to the top. — Jake Byrne

For decades afterwards, I punished myself with images of Sofia standing
naked in the snow, shivering, clutching a chunk of cement that a guard had told her was soap, in the worst winter Poland has ever known. But as I stared at the empty train tracks and thought of the stationmaster making the schoolyard slash across his throat, I had no idea what he was talking about. I could not have conjured up the kind of man who would be willing to design an oven that would be economically fueled by the fat of the men, women and children it was burning. I would not have believed that these same engineers would find other men willing to carry out their monstrous plans. I, too, would have dismissed it as propaganda, that one kind of human being could industriously collect and kill six million of another kind of human being. Somewhere along the line, there would have to be someone who said no.
Forgive me, Sofia. Forgive me, Isaiah. I did not know. — Helen Maryles Shankman

Loyalty isn't standing by someone when he's right - that's good judgment. Loyalty is standing by someone when he's wrong. — Susan Estrich

Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly. — Friedrich Engels

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

Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you're washing up
in a stranger's bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
darkness,
suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
bathroom's gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away. — Richard Siken

RBG's old friend Gloria Steinem, who marvels at seeing the justice's image all over campuses, is happy to see RBG belie Steinem's own long-standing observation: "Women lose power with age, and men gain it." Historically, one way women have lost power is by being nudged out the door to make room for someone else. — Irin Carmon

Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by one single desire. You want a thing and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them
just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept. — Ayn Rand

One cancels the other, and yet without one, the other is incomplete. In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else's dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home. — Azar Nafisi

was fascinated to learn that a group of neuroscientists at the University of Geneva25 had induced similar out-of-body experiences by delivering mild electric current to a specific spot in the brain, the temporal parietal junction. In one patient this produced a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body; in another it induced an eerie feeling that someone was standing behind her. This research confirms what our patients tell us: that the self can be detached from the body and live a phantom existence on its own. Similarly, — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

There are times you find yourself standing by the wayside, watching as someone struggles to dig a well with a spoon, and you wish with all your heart you had arms and a shovel. — Richelle E. Goodrich

For as I am standing there I look closer into the grandstand and see that there is someone waiting. It is my mother, and all at once I cannot stop seeing her. Her skin is rough. Her whole face seems magnetized, like ore. Her deep brown eyes are circled with dark skin, but full of eagerness. In her eyes I see the force of her love. It is bulky and hard to carry, like a package that keeps untying. It is like this dress that no excuse accounts for. It is embarrassing. I walk to her, drawn by her, unable to help myself. — Louise Erdrich

The irony is that when we're standing across from someone who is hidden or shielded by masks and armor, we feel frustrated and disconnected. That's the paradox here: Vulnerability is the last thing I want you to see in me, but the first thing I look for in you. If — Brene Brown

Without people coming in to our lives we never evolve, we just remain stagnant. Surely there is more to life than standing still whilst letting it pass you by. What's even worse, is living a life pretending to be someone, or something that you believe others want you to be. — Skye High

I just met you and I'm amazed by your already.
Your beauty has me blind to all others.
My eyes will always find you in a crowd.
My favorite part of the day is when I get to hear your laugh.
One day you'll let someone in and he'll be a lucky bastard.
One day you are going to discover how beautiful and strong you are.
I hope that I'm standing right next to you holding your hand when you do. — Kimberly Lauren

We had been seen. The thought stayed with me as I disposed of the leftovers - how could it not? I drove with one eye on the rearview mirror, waiting for the blinding burst of blue light to flare at my bumper and the brief harsh whoop! of a siren. But nothing came; not even after I ditched Valentine's car, climbed into mine, and drove carefully home. Nothing. I was left entirely at liberty, all alone, pursued only by the demons of my imagination. It seemed impossible - someone had seen me at play, as plainly as it was possible to be seen. They had looked at the carefully carved pieces of Valentine, and the happy-weary carver standing above them, and it would not take a differential equation to arrive at a solution to this problem - A plus B equals a seat in Old Sparky for Dexter, and someone had fled with this conclusion in perfect comfort and safety - but they had not called the police? It — Jeff Lindsay

A walk is exploring surfaces and textures with finger, toe, and - yuck - tongue; standing still and seeing who or what comes by; trying out different forms of locomotion (among them running, marching, high-kicking, galloping, scooting, projectile falling, spinning, and noisy shuffling). It is archeology: exploring the bit of discarded candy wrapper; collecting a fistful of pebbles and a twig and a torn corner of a paperback; swishing dirt back and forth along the ground. It is stopping to admire the murmuring of the breeze in the trees; locating the source of the bird's song; pointing. Pointing! - using the arm to extend one's fallen gaze so someone else can see what you've seen. It is a time of sharing. On our block, — Alexandra Horowitz

The longer someone ignores an email before finally responding, the more relative social power that person has. Map these response times across an entire organization and you get a remarkably accurate chart of the actual social standing. The boss leaves emails unanswered for hours or days; those lower down respond within minutes. There's an algorithm for this, a data mining method called "automated social hierarchy detection," developed at Columbia University.8 When applied to the archive of email traffic at Enron Corporation before it folded, the method correctly identified the roles of top-level managers and their subordinates just by how long it took them to answer a given person's emails. Intelligence agencies have been applying the same metric to suspected terrorist gangs, piecing together the chain of influence to spot the central figures. — Daniel Goleman

That he liked to think of himself as a philosopher. That he questioned all things, even the most simple, to the extent that when someone passing him on the street raised his hat and said, 'Good day,' Litvinoff often paused so long to weigh evidence that by the time he'd settled on an answer the person had gone on his way, leaving him standing alone. — Nicole Krauss

We think our actions express our decisions. But in nearly all of our life, willing decides nothing. We cannot wake up or fall asleep, remember or forget our dreams, summon or banish our thoughts, by deciding to do so. When we greet someone on the street we just act, and there is no actor standing behind what we do. Our acts are end points in long sequences of unconscious responses. They arise from a structure of habits and skills that is almost infinitely complicated. Most of our life in enacted without conscious awareness. Nor can it be made conscious. No degree of self-awareness can make us self-transparent. — John N. Gray

When someone uses Philosophy as an indispensable tool for tackling Theology and knows no other way for approaching that scripture-related Science, then you must have already figured out by now that he is a gentile who is standing right before you. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

This wasn't a place for illusions; the reality here was the genuine happiness that came about from the natural magic of standing next to someone and being consumed by the fortitude in his or her humanity. — Ishmael Beah

He had felt that a moment before his making the turn, someone had been there. The air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through. Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person's standing might raise the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. There was no understanding it. Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak.
But now, tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. His inner mind, reaching out to turn the corner for him, had heard the faintest whisper. Breathing? Or was the atmosphere compressed merely by someone standing very quietly there, waiting?
He turned the corner. — Ray Bradbury

Arin instinctively touched his cut cheek and winced. Then he grit his teeth. His face wasn't his face anymore, but so what? Maybe it suited him. Maybe Arin had been too soft, too trusting, too baby-skinned, too much like that boy he'd been before the war, the one who had made him turn back to find Kestrel standing by the moonlit canal.
Arin was glad that boy was gone. He was glad to be someone new. — Marie Rutkoski

It was a Friday morning, and Walmart was populated only by the occasional mom with very young children and the random senior citizen, which made my bathroom makeover less conspicuous. Only one woman came in while I stood in front of the mirror, and she went straight to the toilets. I made sure that when she came out I was no longer standing in front of the mirror but was huddled with my palms stretched out beneath a loud hand dryer, my face completely averted. No one expects to see a celebrity in their local Walmart bathroom. Most of us don't really look at each other anyway. Our eyes glance off without really registering what we're seeing. It's human nature. It's polite society. Ignore each other unless someone is grotesquely fat or immodestly dressed or disfigured in some way - and then we pretend not to see, but we see everything. I was none of those things, and so far human nature was working in my favor. — Amy Harmon

I cannot have a man who is afraid of everything, I don't have the time to soothe insecurities and fears, I cannot have a man who is standing on a stone by a creek, watching for the fish to swim by and every time he sees a fish he says "Oh look, this fish scares me, I wonder what this fish means, this fish might mean- this, or this fish might mean- that" for God's sake, they are just fish, and they don't mean anything! Such a sad thing, so many fine, strong men standing on top of little stones, pointing at fish all the time! Such a waste! Such a waste of time! I can only have a man who will leap into the water, not minding the damn fish and whatever other little things that scare him. I need to have someone who is braver than me; if I am a pirate, he has to be the pirate Captain, if I am a pirate Captain he has to be the flying dragon. — C. JoyBell C.

I've a habit of placing a happy-face or a frowny-face on my calendar, depending on what kind of day I've had. Often I slap a droopy circle in the box, discouraged by the things I failed to accomplish and the unpleasant encounters endured. But then, invariably, a wise muse stops to ask me these three questions:
Did your children let you hug them today? Yes.
Did you do a kind deed for someone? Anyone? Yes.
Did God forsake you today? No.
Then, my dear, despite your challenges, it was a good day after all.
Standing corrected, I twist that frowny-face upside down and smile. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binoculars we seem utterly remote down here. It is this know dimension if distance and time and the perplexing question posed by the canyon itself- What is consequential? (in one's life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet)- that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie ... Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawing trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics ... — Barry Lopez

Tessa had begun to tremble. This is what she had always wanted someone to say. What she had always, in the darkest corner of her heart, wanted Will to say. Will, the boy who loved the same books she did, the same poetry she did, who made her laugh even when she was furious. And here he was standing in front of her, telling her he loved the words of her heart, the shape of her soul. Telling her something she had never imagined anyone would ever tell her. Telling her something she would never be told again, not in this way. And not by him.
And it did not matter.
"It's too late", she said. — Cassandra Clare

September laughed a little. She tried to make it sound light and happy, as though it were all over now and how funny it was, when you think about it, that simply not having another person by you could hurt so. But it did not come out quite right; there was a heaviness in her laughing like ice at the bottom of a glass. She still missed Saturday, yet he was standing right beside her! Missing him had become a part of her, like a hard, dark bone, and she needed so much more than a few words to let it go. In all this while, she had spent more time missing Saturday than seeing him. — Catherynne M Valente

A Black man should be more independent and depend on himself for his freedom and not to take it for granted that someone would lead him to it. The blacks are tired of standing at the touchlines to witness a game that they should be playing. They want to do things for themselves and all by themselves. — Steven Biko

It is not known that Litvinoff's favorite flower was the peony. That his favorite form of punctuation was the question mark. That he had terrible dreams and could only fall asleep, if he could fall asleep at all, with a glass of warm milk. That he often imagined his own death. That he thought the woman who loved him was wrong to. That he was flat-footed. That his favorite food was the potato.That he liked to think of himself as a philosopher. That he questioned all things, even the most simple, to the extent that when someone passing him on the street raised his hat and said, "Good day," Litvinoff often paused so long to weigh the evidence that by the time he'd settled on an answer the person had gone on his way, leaving him standing alone.
These things were lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone ever taking the time to write it all down. — Nicole Krauss

Not that there seems to be any appropriate place to bury someone, but these municipal cemeteries, or any cemetery at all for that matter, like the ones by the highway, or the ones in the middle of town, with all these bodies with their corresponding rocks - oh it's just too primitive and vulgar, isn't it? The hole, and the box, and the rock on the grass? And we glamorize this process, feel it fitting and dramatic, austerely beautiful, standing there by the hole as we lower the box. It's incredible. Barbaric and base. — Dave Eggers

At bottom the world isn't a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone, to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions; to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the standing argument. — Robert Frost

But the world can't comprehend a woman being that strong. We're supposed to buckle and break, like the only time we can possibly have any strength is if there's someone with a dick standing by our side.
It's like a penis is a prerequisite for an opinion, so if I don't have one myself, I've got to be utilizing someone else's in order to have any say-so in my own fucking life. — J.M. Darhower

Hey you ! out there in the cold
Getting lonely, getting old, can you feel me
Hey you ! Standing in the aisles
With itchy feet and fading smiles, can you feel me
Hey you ! don't help them to bury the light
Don't give in without a fight.
Hey you ! out there on your own
sitting naked by the phone would you touch me
Hey you ! with your ear against the wall
Waiting for someone to call out would you touch me
Hey you ! would you help me to carry the stone
Open your heart, I'm coming home
But it was only a fantasy
The wall was too high as you can see
No matter how he tried he could not break free
And the worms ate into his brain.
Hey you ! out there on the road
Always doing what you're told, can you help me
Hey you ! out there beyond the wall
Breaking bottles in the hall, can you help me
Hey you ! don't tell me there's no hope at all
Together we stand, divided we fall. — Pink Floyd

At a time when our moral standing in the world has been weakened by a rubber stamp Justice Department that placed the Bush Administration above the law, we now need someone who is objective and independent. And, make no mistake, Eric Holder is independent. — Debbie Wasserman Schultz

I'm standing by the cereal, reaching for a box of Honey Nut Cheerios, when I feel my chest clenching but not unclenching. It clenches tighter and tighter, like someone has wrapped a corset around it. My palms are wet. My head is compressing, growing and shrinking at the same time. I can hear my breathing, and it's so amplified that, to my own ears, I sound like Darth Vader. A woman at the end of the aisle is frozen as she watches me. She looks scared...My breathing is getting louder, and I cover my ears to block it out. And that's when the ceiling starts to spin and the air disappears and my lungs won't stop working and I can't breathe at all. I drop everything and run away from the cart and all that food until I'm out the door. I stand in the parking lot, bent over at the waist, breathing in the fresh night air, and then I lie flat on the ground, as if this will open my lungs wider and make them work again, only the breath won't come. — Jennifer Niven