Quotes & Sayings About Straying

Built up by the contiguity of the memories that followed one another, the black tunnel, in which my thoughts had been straying so long that they had even ceased to be aware of it, was suddenly broken by an interval of sunlight, allowing me to see in the distance a blue and smiling universe in which Albertine was no more than a memory, unimportant and full of charm. Is it this, I asked myself, that is the true Albertine, or is it indeed the person who, in the darkness through which I have so long been rolling, seemed to me the sole reality? — Marcel Proust

She saw that they felt themselves alone in that crowded room. And Vronsky's face, always so firm and independent, held that look that had struck her, of bewilderment and humble submissiveness, like the expression of an intelligent dog when it has done wrong.
Anna smiled, and her smile was reflected by him. She grew thoughtful, and he became serious. Some supernatural force drew Kitty's eyes to Anna's face. She was enchanting in her simple black dress, enchanting were her round arms with their bracelets, enchanting was her firm neck with its thread of pearls, fascinating the straying curls of her loose hair, enchanting the graceful, light movements of her little feet and hands, enchanting was that lovely face in its animation, but there was something terrible and cruel about her charm. — Leo Tolstoy

My thoughts kept straying onto random paths ... hoping to get lost in a thicket. — Barbara Kingsolver

If a prisoner hadn't lived outside, he would not
detest the dungeon. Desiring knows there's satisfaction beyond this. Straying maps
the path. A secret freedom opens through a crevice you can barely see. Your love
of many things proves they're one. Every separate stiff trunk and stem in the garden
connects with nimble root hairs underground. The awareness a wine drinker wants cannot
be tasted in wine, but that failure brings his deep thirst closer. So the heart keeps ignoring
the waterfall and the key, but there is one guiding through all the desiring restlessness. — Rumi

There is, however, possibly a serious side to the question, for some of the children, indeed all who have been missed at night, have been slightly torn or wounded in the throat. The wounds seem such as might be made by a rat or a small dog, and although of not much importance individually, would tend to show that whatever animal inflicts them has a system or method of its own. The police of the division have been instructed to keep a sharp lookout for straying children, especially when very young, in and around Hampstead Heath, and for any stray dog which may be about. — Bram Stoker

The Canarsie People said the knowing belongs to the old and wise, but the unfolding is in the keeping of the young. The old prevent the young from straying off the path of wisdom. The young yearn after the path of dreams. Between the two there is truth. — Beverly Swerling

Don't cry,' he breathed out so very close to my face. Just a little closer and I'd feel his lips ghosting against mine. "It's like a punch in my guts when you cry.'
"You shouldn't touch me,' I said, but despite my words, I didn't try to move away from his touch. A tear ran to my upper lip and I tasted it with the very tip of my tongue. Nolan's eyes darkened when he followed it, not straying from my mouth. I could see goosebumps over his skin on his neck and on his forearms. "Nolan? — Stephanie Witter

And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive hiding in the cellar from his faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (Hanif's dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the cinema to be an extension of the brothel business), where life has been transmuted into grotesquery by the irruption into it of history, eventually in the murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes straying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose kurta and above the dupatta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and then — Salman Rushdie

The hand at her back stroked up and down. Never straying too far south, but igniting a fire inside her that she wanted this fireman to stoke instead of extinguish — Tamara Hoffa

Oh you, straying heart, just come! Oh you, aching liver, just come! If the path to the gate is closed, Take the way by the wall, but come! — Rumi

If you kill me, you will lose your soul and your son to the sky," I warned, my eyes straying briefly to his young son who met my gaze, his hands clinging to the mane of his enormous horse. "Kneel! — Amy Harmon

25For i you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to j the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls. — Anonymous

If I had just a little bit of wisdom I should walk the great path and fear only straying from it. — Lao-Tzu

Then you understand the wide range of the totally new and unexpected creations they can sometimes come up with. Most people's minds travel along the same road traveled by everyone else, never straying off the route of conventional wisdom. Makers know no such boundaries. They have a rare ability to make their own roads of thought. Their minds venture through the wilderness of all that exists, combining random bits of knowledge in ways that have never been imagined before. — Terry Goodkind

Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? — Friedrich Nietzsche

The amorous shepherd has lost his staff,
And his sheep are straying on the hillside,
And he didn't even play the flute he brought to play because he was thinking so much.
No one came to him or went away. He never found his staff again.
Others, cursing at him, gathered his sheep for him.
No one had loved him, in the end.

When he got up from the hillside and the false truth, he saw everything:
The great valleys full of the same green as always,
The great distant mountains, more real than any feeling,
All reality, with the sky and the air and the fields that exist, is present.
(And once again the air, that he'd missed for so long, entered coolly into his lungs)
And he felt that the air was opening again, but with pain, a liberty in his chest.

(7/10/1930) — Alberto Caeiro

Unfortunately, I'll need to watch them again at some point, because my mind keeps straying back to reality. I envy Deo's ability to lose himself in fantasy for a while. That type of break seems almost as useful as sleep for keeping stress at bay, and I've never really mastered it. — Rysa Walker

I say, I can not identify that thing which is called happiness, that thing whose token is a laugh, or a smile, or a silent serenity on the lip. I may have been happy, but it is not in my conscious memory now. Nor do I feel a longing for it, as though I had never had it; my spirit seeks different food from happiness, for I think I have a suspicion of what it is. I have suffered wretchedness, but not because of the absence of happiness, and without praying for happiness. I pray for peace
for motionlessness
for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual sensation. I feel that there can be no perfect peace in individualness. Therefore, I hope one day to feel myself drank up into the pervading spirit animating all things. I feel I am an exile here. I still go straying. — Herman Melville

62. It is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive table form; were he to want black excluded as a color for the liturgical vestments; were he to forbid the use of sacred images and statues in Churches; were he to order the crucifixes designed that the Divine Redeemer's Body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; lastly were he to disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See. — Pope Pius XII

Self-correction makes me check the ruler of my life against the yardstick of my inner voice. I acknowledge when I don't measure up. Self-correction is an ongoing process. If done often enough, I can stop myself from straying off the path. — Stella Payton

Aware of her uneasy gaze straying to his rampant arousal, Sebastian shot her a scornful glance.
"Pay it no mind," he said, climbing into bed with her. "From now on, I have every expectation that proximity to you will affect my private parts like a prolonged swim in a Siberian lake. — Lisa Kleypas

I know women whose entire personas are woven from a benign mediocrity. Their lives are a list of shortcomings: the unappreciative boyfriend, the extra ten pounds, the dismissive boss, the conniving sister, the straying husband. I've always hovered above their stories, nodding in sympathy and thinking how foolish they are, these women, to let these things happen, how undisciplined. And now to be one of them! One of the women with the endless stories that make people nod sympathetically and think: Poor dumb bitch. I could hear the tale, how everyone would love — Gillian Flynn

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God. — Lenny Bruce

Their heroes were always straying from well-lit paths and into the woods. Or maybe it was a single wood: the dark place where the things they feared most dwelled. And so, he reassured himself, he had the advantage of knowing already how this had to end. He had stopped to admire a flower, had gotten waylaid in the shadows, but in no time at all he would be back on the path again renewed and rededicated. For was that not the point of the woods? — Garth Risk Hallberg

You were crying. It's a terrible thing, loving the sea."
"Yes," she whispered, her eyes straying to it. Waves gathered and broke invisibly in the dark, reaching toward her, pulling back. They were never silent, they never spoke. — Patricia A. McKillip

Julia, you are incomparable. I know what I risk in straying from you, what I would lose if you left me. I promise to never ... — Alessandra Torre

As I was trying to climb this slippery empathy wall, a subversive thought occurred to me: do we need all the new plastic the American Chemical Association is promising us? Weren't we entering into a strange cycle? Many people I was talking to carried around plastic water bottles, partly for convenience, partly out of distrust of local waters. And with cheap natural gas at hand, the American Chemical Association said it could triple the amount of feedstock needed to make plastic. But if we triple our plastics, more petrochemical companies will pollute more public waters, which will lead more people to pay for more plastic bottles filled with ever more scarce clean water. We'll throw away more plastic bottles, buy more, and further expand the market for plastic, the production of which pollutes water. But I was straying from my goal, getting into the spirit of things. Two — Arlie Russell Hochschild

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another. — Iain Banks

..you are retained as counsel for unhappy mankind. You have promised to help those in peril by sea, those in captivity, the sick and the needy, and those whose heads are under the poised axe. Whither are you straying? What are you doing? — Seneca.

In the great pasture of life there are really only four kinds of creatures: sheep, as Dani likes to call them; shepherds who try to guide the sheep and keep them on the straight and narrow; sheepdogs who run them from field to field, prevent them from straying, and fight off the predators that come to slaughter and feast; and wolves, savage, fierce, and a law unto their own. — Karen Marie Moning

It was the straying that found the path direct. — Austin Osman Spare

This world's a city full of straying streets, and death's the market-place where each one meets. — William Shakespeare

For being human, we remember and forget. We stray and return, fall down and get up, and cling and let go, again and again. But it is this straying and returning that makes life interesting, this clinging and letting go - damned as it is - that exercises the heart. — Mark Nepo

O! Will you be staying,
Or will you be flying?
Your ponies are straying!
The daylight is dying!
To fly would be folly,
To stay would be jolly
And listen and hark
Till the end of the dark
to our tune
ha! ha! — J.R.R. Tolkien

Lover?" The boy lifts an eyebrow suggestively. My face grows hot. "He's my - my friend." "Then why worry?" The boy flashes a grin tinged with wickedness, and I find myself smiling in return. I glance over my shoulder at Izzi, talking to an earnest-looking Scholar. She laughs at something he says, her hands, for once, not straying to her eyepatch. When she catches me watching, she looks between the Tribal boy and me and waggles her eyebrows. My face goes hot again. One dance can't hurt; we can leave after. The — Sabaa Tahir

From my insufficiency to my perfection, and from my deviation to my equilibrium
From my sublimity to my beauty, and from my splendor to my majesty
From my scattering to my gathering, and from my rejection to my communion
From my baseness to my preciousness, and from my stones to my pearls
From my rising to my setting, and from my days to my nights
From my luminosity to my darkness, and from my guidance to my straying
From my perigee to my apogee, and from the base of my lance to its tip
From my waxing to my waning, and from the void of my moon to its crescent
From my pursuit to my flight, and from my steed to my gazelle
From my breeze to my boughs, and from my boughs to my shade
From my shade to my delight, and from my delight to my torment
From my torment to my likeness, and from my likeness to my impossibility
From my impossibility to my validity, and from my validity to my deficiency.
I am no one in existence but myself, — Ibn Arabi

The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart. — Rabindranath Tagore

In the Hillary Clinton model, the wife chooses to support the straying husband while wearing a distressed and presumably pained expression in public. She stays in the marriage as a way to serve both her personal ambition as well as their shared ambition to achieve ever-greater positions of power and influence. — Monica Crowley

It is not quite as dark here as we thought. On the contrary, the interior is pulsating with light. It is, of course, the internal light of roots, a wandering phosphorescence, tiny veins of a light marbling the darkness, an evanescent shimmer of nightmarish substances. Likewise, when we sleep, severed from the world, straying into deep introversion, on a return journey into ourselves, we can see clearly through our closed eyelids, because thoughts are kindled in us by internal tapers and smolder erratically. This is how total regressions occur, retreats into self, journeys to the roots. This is how we branch out into anamnesis and are shaken by underground subcutaneous shivers. For it is only above ground, in the light of day, that we are a trembling, articulate bundle of tunes; in the depth we disintegrate again into black murmurs, confused purring, a multitude of unfinished stories. — Bruno Schulz

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things. — Gary Snyder

Intuitively, she sensed Leonardo's gaze on her, and she caught sight of him near the entrance to the balcony. He was watching her, though he should have been engrossed in the conversation with the two other people with whom he was standing, one of which was the redhead. Even from that distance across the room, she could sense his desire for her, and there was an answering pounding of the blood in her veins as their gazes locked.

Maybe it was the kiss between Russell and Joan and the romantic notion of long-lasting love, but Alexa found her thoughts straying to memories of sharing passionate kisses with Leonardo. She carefully placed her glass of wine on the table before it slipped from her damp fingers and crashed onto the expensive white carpet. She felt nervous and jittery because she knew the reason for Leonardo's smoldering scrutiny. She was fully aware of what was expected of her, and she found herself breathlessly anticipating the end of the evening. — Delaney Diamond

Jesus did not use hell to try and compel "heathens" and "pagans" to believe in God, so they wouldn't burn when they die. He talked about hell to very religious people to warn them about the consequences of straying from their God-given calling and identity to show the world God's love. — Rob Bell

THE BOTTOMS" succeeded to "Hell Row". Hell Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on Greenhill Lane. There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away. The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin. And all over the countryside were these same pits, some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and the meadows. And the cottages of these coal-miners, in blocks and pairs here and there, together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers, straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood. — D.H. Lawrence

Journalism is straying into entertainment. The lines between serious news segments, news entertainment, and news comedy are blurring. — Drew Curtis

And Iseult rose up where she sat apart,
And with her sweet soul deepening her deep eyes
Cast the furs from her and subtle embroideries
That wrapped her from the storming rain and spray,
And shining like all April in one day,
Hair, face, and throat dashed with the straying showers,
She stood the first of all the whole world's flowers,
And laughed on Tristram with her eyes, and said,
"I too have heart then, I was not afraid."
And answering some light courteous word of grace
He saw her clear face lighten on his face
Unwittingly, with unenamoured eyes
For the last time. — Algernon Charles Swinburne

Even in the wood, there was a right road and a wrong one. All the most terrifying fairy tales inevitably began with some foolish innocent (or two) straying from the path. Then anything might happen. — Robert Dunbar

I understand why there would be prohibitions on straying from monogamy because of the harm that it does not only to the person who is betrayed, but also to the person who is betraying. "Betray" is a sort of shorthand for what happens. — Andrew Solomon

Our human race is affected by a chronic underestimation of the possibility of the future straying from the course initially envisioned (in addition to other biases that sometimes exert a compounding effect). To take an obvious example, think about how many people divorce. Almost all of them are acquainted with the statistic that between one-third and one-half of all marriages fail, something the parties involved did not forecast while tying the knot. Of course, "not us," because "we get along so well" (as if others tying the knot got along poorly). — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Love and meekness, lord,
Become a churchman better than ambition:
Win straying souls with modesty again,
Cast none away. — William Shakespeare

From that day, I vowed never to squander a moment's care over the good opinion of others. May they rot in hell. You have heard of my abstemiousness in matters of food and sex. Here is why: I punished myself. If I caught my thoughts straying to another's opinion of me, I sent myself to bed without supper. As for women, I likewise permitted myself none. I missed no few meals, and no small pleasure, before I brought this vice under control. — Steven Pressfield

Their heart does not allow them to practise duplicity: if they see their friend straying from the road, or committing any faults, they will speak to her about it; they cannot allow themselves to do anything else. — Teresa Of Avila

To keep me from sin and straying from Him, God has used devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. My life vows destined to be spent in the light irradiating from the tabernacle, and it is to the Heart of Jesus that I dare go for the solution of all my problems — Pope John XXIII

So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant, the sun was hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood,
by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those we are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know. Holmes had won of course, the brute with the red nostrils had won. But even Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world. — Virginia Woolf

The Parable of the Lost Sheep 10"Take heed that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that in heaven their angels always see the face of My Father who is in heaven. 11"For the Son of Man has come to save that which was lost.a 12"What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them goes astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine and go to the mountains to seek the one that is straying? 13"And if he should find it, assuredly, I say to you, he rejoices more over that sheep than over the ninety-nine that did not go astray. 14"Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish. — John C. Maxwell

When asked out, I am hesitant, my glance straying to the beeefy, 400-page mystery thriller lounging seductively on the nightstand next to my bed, with come hither eyes that promise an exciting evening of one climax after another. Never had a chance. Staying in Saturday night. — Ava Zavora

No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. We have many organizers, but few agonizers; many players and payers, few pray-ers; many singers, few clingers; lots of pastors, few wrestlers; many fears, few tears; much fashion, little passion; many interferers, few intercessors; many writers, but few fighters. Failing here, we fail everywhere. — Leonard Ravenhill

On the Path of the Wise there is probably no danger more deadly, no poison more pernicious, no seduction more subtle than Spiritual Pride; it strikes, being solar, at the very heart of the Aspirant; more, it is an inflation and exacerbation of the Ego, so that its victim runs the peril of straying into a Black Lodge, and finding himself at home there. — Aleister Crowley

Was it just that? She was to be content to weave a steady life with him, all one fabric, but perhaps brocaded with the occasional flower of an adventure. But how could she know what she would feel next year? How could one ever know? How could one say Yes? for years and years? The little yes, gone on a breath! Why should one be pinned down by that butterfly word? Of course it had to flutter away and be gone, to be followed by other yes's and no's! Like the straying of butterflies. — D.H. Lawrence

If I have even just a little sense, I will walk on the main road and my only fear will be of straying from it. Keeping to the main road is easy, But people love to be sidetracked. — Laozi

I know it's not strictly sex that accounts for my straying the motive usually attributed to men. I think it's just too tempting to have two lives rather than one. Some people think that too much travel begets infidelity: Separation and opportunity test the bonds of love. I think it's more likely that people who hate to make choices to settle on one thing or another are attracted to travel. Travel doesn't beget a double life. The appeal of the double life begets travel. — Elisabeth Eaves

I advise everyone to choose a religion based upon the beauty that the religion has brought to the world. There is much to be said about every religion, there is much evil in history written about every religion, and at the end of the day, you're only going to find out which one works after you're dead and if you're lucky, that won't happen soon! Simply put, you believe in the things that you believe in right now, because you were indoctrinated with fear from a very young age, forward. You fear straying a path that you were told you should walk on. So what path should you really walk on? Walk on the path that has created, is creating, and will be creating - beauty. The only real sign of anything worthwhile, is beauty. The true religion is the belief in what is beautiful. So if something creates a beauty in your heart and in the world - walk that path. — C. JoyBell C.

The pleasant converse of the fireside, the simple songs of home, the words of encouragement as I bend over my school-tasks, the kiss as I lie down to rest, the patient bearing with the freaks of my restless nature, the gentle counsels mingled with reproofs and approvals, the sympathy that meets and assuages every sorrow, and sweetens every little success
all these return to me amid the responsibilities which press upon me now, and I feel as if I had once lived in heaven, and, straying, had lost my way. — J.G. Holland

For all its faults, it is partisanship - based on core principles- that clarifies our debates, that prevents one party from straying too far from the mainstream and that constantly refreshes our politics with new ideas and new leaders. — Tom DeLay

I wonder if you're fast as they say," Bessie Weasel chirruped, her hand slowly straying toward the belt.
"Wondering is free," Cinnabar said finally, his voice soft and low. "Certainty has its price". — Daniel Polansky

Animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and
our vices, straying before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our
souls. God shows them to us in order to induce us to reflect.
Only since animals are mere shadows, God has not made them
capable of education in the full sense of the word; what is the
use? On the contrary, our souls being realities and having a
210
goal which is appropriate to them, God has bestowed on them
intelligence; that is to say, the possibility of education. Social
education, when well done, can always draw from a soul, of
whatever sort it may be, the utility which it contains. — Victor Hugo

The particular threat to
the intellectual today, whether in the West or the nonWestern
world, is not the academy, nor the suburbs, nor the appalling commercialism of journalism and publishing
houses, but rather an attitude that I will call professionalism.
By professionalism I mean thinking of your work
as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between
the hours of nine and five with one eye on the clock, and
another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional
behavior-not rocking the boat, not straying outside
the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable
and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial
and unpolitical and "objective. — Edward Said

Who would have thought that a tap-dancing penguin would outpoint James Bond at the box office? And deserve to? Not that there's anything wrong with 'Casino Royale.' But 'Happy Feet' - written and directed by George Miller - is a complete charmer, even if, in the way of most family fare, it can't resist straying into the Inspirational. — Robert Gottlieb

Aren't we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn't empty space breathing at us? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Ultimately, Roger learned only of the encounter with the urban bees. The boy remained thoroughly fascinated by what he heard nonetheless, his blue-eyed stare never once straying from Holmes; his visage passive and accepting, his eyes wide, Roger's pupils stated fixed on those venerable, reflective eyes, as though the boy were seeing distant lights shimmering along an opaque horizon, a glimpse of something flickering and alive existing beyond his reach. And, in turn, the gray eyes that focused sharply on him - piercing and kind at the same instant - endeavoured to bridge the lifetime that separated the two of them, attempting to do so as brandy was sipped, and the vial's glass grew warmer against soft palms, and that seasoned, well-lived voice somehow made Roger feel much older and more worldly than his years. — Mitch Cullin

People have a lot less leniency for some reason for women straying from a relationship than they do for men. — Jason Segel

THE WOLF AND THE LAMB A Wolf came upon a Lamb straying from the flock, — Aesop

Some people are destined to dream (some, indeed, are paid rather well to do so); some are born to work, practical and concrete and tireless; and there are others who are like a river, who flow effortlessly down from source to mouth, hardly straying from its bed. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

On a cold, fretful afternoon in early October, 1872, a hansom cab drew up outside the offices of Lockhart and Selby, Shipping Agents, in the financial heart of London, and a young girl got out and paid the driver.
She was a person of sixteen or so
alone, and uncommonly pretty. She was slender and pale, and dressed in mourning, with a black bonnet under which she tucked back a straying twist of blond hair that the wind had teased loose. She had unusually dark brown eyes for one so fair. Her name was Sally Lockhart; and within fifteen minutes, she was going to kill a man. — Philip Pullman

To dig a straight furrow, the plowman needs to keep his eyes on a fixed point ahead of him. That keeps him on a true course. If, however, he happens to look back to see where he has been, his chances of straying are increased. The results are crooked and irregular furrows ... Fix your attention on your ... goals and never look back on your earlier problems ... If our energies are focused not behind us but ahead of us
on eternal life and the joy of salvation
we assuredly will obtain it. — Howard W. Hunter

I know that I'll forever be involved in ballet. This is where my life was meant to be, and I don't see myself straying completely away, ever. — Misty Copeland

As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts. — Gautama Buddha

The greater evil who is in-
When both in wayward paths are straying?
The poor sinner for the pain
Or he who pays for the sin? — Juana Ines De La Cruz

To other scientists, the scientist who corrects a colleague's error, or cites good reasons for seriously doubting his or her conclusions, performs a noble deed, like a Zen master who boxes the ears of a novice straying from the meditative path, although scientists correct one another more as equals than as master and student. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Straying off course is not recognized as a capital crime by civilized nations. — Jeane Kirkpatrick

So long as we insist upon defining our identities only in terms of our work, so long as we try to blind ourselves to the needs of our children and harden our hearts against them, we will continue to feel torn, dissatisfied, and exhausted ... . The guilt we feel for neglecting our children is a byproduct of our love for them. It keeps us from straying too far from them, for too long. Their cry should be more compelling than the call from the office. — Danielle Crittenden

The cat's tail was straying into her face again; she was forced to expel air in a most unbecoming fashion to avoid a mouthful of hair. — Meredith Duran

We are therefore constantly on the road, straying from one mental image to the next, and identify with these images, and derive our identity from the images. — Frank M. Wanderer

China frequently confounds stock market prognosticators because it has a penchant for straying markedly from other broad global indexes year-by-year over the decades - even from emerging markets. It's hit or miss. — Kenneth Fisher

I don't know what they are. They aren't completely human, so I don't know what to call them." I pulled one of the bags over the man's head, then rolled it down to his waist. My fingers brushed Clare's; the feel of her skin sent a warm tingle firing up my arms. I met her gaze, and without thinking too much about it, I slid my right hand over hers. God, I had missed her.
"Owen, there is a dead body between us," she said, her gaze never straying from mine.
"Best be thankful for that, flower." I pushed down everything I wanted to say. There wasn't time, and her bloody kitchen definitely wasn't the place. — Elizabeth Morgan

I think you're very lucky to find somebody you can coexist with without straying or going mad or being angry. That's whether you're Liam Gallagher and Nicole Appleton, Robbie Williams and Ayda Field, or Tim and June from down the road. — Robbie Williams

Concentration is not thinking of one thing. On the contrary, it is excluding all thoughts, since all thoughts obstruct the sense of one's true being. All efforts are to be directed simply to removing the veil of ignorance. Concentrating the mind solely on the Self will lead to happiness or bliss. Drawing in the thoughts, restraining them and preventing them from straying outwards is called detachment (vairagya). Fixing them in the Self is spiritual practice (sadhana). Concentrating on the heart is the same as concentrating on the Self. Heart is another name for Self. — Ramana Maharshi

Being creative and playing with your content during the holidays is a great idea. But straying too far from your fundamental brand (from address, logo, etc.) can be a dangerous game. Your recipients need to be able to recognize you during this busy time of year. — Paul Ford

On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.
Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my dream and felt a sweet trace of a strange fragrance in the south wind.
That vague sweetness made my heart ache with longing and it seemed to me that is was the eager breath of the summer seeking for its completion.
I knew not then that it was so near, that it was mine, and that this perfect sweetness had blossomed in the depth of my own heart. — Rabindranath Tagore

We're straying from the path of salvation because we remember that we once belonged to the world and were content in that belonging. — Daniel Quinn

When sex was something godlike, Lust was the profane curiosity that killed many a straying cat. Now, having removed mystery, Lust is less a long-standing, overpowering yearning, more a sudden craving of the appetite. Less quest, more impulse buy. — Geoffrey Wood

Saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before. — Cheryl Strayed

What is a Lamb of God? People use this phrase.
I don't know.
I watch my sister, fingers straying absently about her mustache,
no help there. — Anne Carson