Stumble Across Quotes & Sayings

Philately is normally a boys' hobby but for some reason it was in vogue at my junior school. Between the ages of eight and ten I collected avidly. I'd pore over my Stanley Gibbons book, obsessively checking my collection's value. I always hoped I'd stumble across a really valuable one, a Penny Black or an Inverted Jenny, but it wasn't to be. — Sophie Ellis-Bextor

It takes a lot of time, focus and energy to realize the enormity of being the ocean with your very own tide every month. However, by honoring the demands of bleeding, our blood gives something in return. The crazed bitch from irritation hell recedes. In her place arises a side of ourselves with whom we may not - at first - be comfortable. She is a vulnerable, highly perceptive genius who can ponder a given issue and take her world by storm. When we're quiet and bleeding, we stumble upon the solutions to dilemmas that've been bugging us all month. Inspiration hits and moments of epiphany rumba 'across de tundra of our senses. In this mode of existence one does not feel antipathy towards a bodily ritual so profoundly and routinely reinforces our cuntpower. — Inga Muscio

Although you may not stumble across a Martian in the garden, you might stumble across yourself. The day that happens, you'll probably also scream a little. And that'll be perfectly all right, because it's not every day you realize you're a living planet dweller on a little island in the universe. — Jostein Gaarder

May I see your dance card?"
"Don't you believe me?" She presented it to him with a flourish.
He ran his fingers down the list of names.
"Hmm ... Waterburn? Bastard. D'Andre. Definitely a worthless bastard. Lord Camber, a thoroughgoing bastard. Lord Michaelson? Bastard. Peter Cheswick? Bast - "
She snatched it from him, laughing.
"I wouldn't dance a waltz with you, anyway, Lord Dryden."
"No?"
"You might accidentally lock eyes with Lisbeth Redmond, stumble, and fling me across the room to avoid crushing my feet. — Julie Anne Long

Some say death is a doorway,
belief the key. Others claim you only
have to stumble across the threshold
to glimpse a hundred billion universes
in the blink of single silver shard. — Ellen Hopkins

I suppose I should wish you success, but that is too easy. I would like to wish you something that is harder to come by. So I am going to wish you meaning in life. And meaning is not something you stumble across like the answer to a riddle or prize in a treasure hunt.

Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you; out of your own talent and understanding, out of things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something, the ingredients are there.

You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account. — Robert Gardner

If poor doomed Olly's a Radio 4 play, what am I?""
"You, Hugo," she kisses my earlobe, "are a sordid, low-budget French film. The sort you'd stumble across on TV at night. You know you'll regret it in the morning, but you keep watching anyway. — David Mitchell

BEANNACHT For Josie On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you. And when your eyes freeze behind the gray window and the ghost of loss gets in to you, may a flock of colors, indigo, red, green and azure blue come to awaken in you a meadow of delight. When the canvas frays in the curach of thought and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you, may there come across the waters a path of yellow moonlight to bring you safely home. May the nourishment of the earth be yours, may the clarity of light be yours, may the fluency of the ocean be yours, may the protection of the ancestors be yours. And so may a slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life. — John O'Donohue

In life we stumble across a lot of things and people who we believe are irreplaceable. But nothing really is irreplaceable until we ensure so. It's all about what we really want. — Mansi Soni

The little dog-eared books in the meeting-house proved poor reading ... So many of them were about unnaturally good children who never did wrong, and unnaturally bad children who never did right. At the end there was always the word MORAL, in big capital letters, as if the readers were supposed to be too blind to find it for themselves, and it had to be put directly across the path for them to stumble over. — Annie Fellows Johnston

I don't want to follow comedians because I don't want to see what they're thinking about, 'cause then maybe I won't stumble across a thought maybe I had about the same subject. — Nick Thune

Intoxicated with her success and his awed eyes, and with the way the wind rushed by and flicked delicate strands of saliva across her cheeks, Will spread out her arms, spun in a pirouette. Shumba chose that moment to stumble over a rabbit hole and with a terrific crash, that sounded and resounded for miles and miles of flei, Will fell into the long grass. — Katherine Rundell

Perhaps nothing is as simple as it looks. Perhaps everything has another layer, a hidden room that only reveals itself when you accidentally stumble across the secret door.
Or perhaps I'm talking bollocks and it's time to go to bed. — Liz Kessler

Once he reached the farm he followed a barely used dirt road that led towards the sandstone cliffs. He heard the dog scrabbling across the rocky ground. The huffling of her breath. Some of the rocks were quite large and he turned and watched her stumble into them. In terrain like this she could easily break a leg and yet she lurched on, determined to find him. When she finally reached him she touched his leg with her nose, before settling down a few feet away, blind head looking out of over the dry Limpopo below. He wished he could pluck out her eyes and hold them in his hands like marbles. Rub them together, make thunder, bring rain. Instead he nudged the safety catch off his rifle and shot her. — Lisa Fugard

Jury trials are really nothing more than poorly written stage plays. You've got two authors writing opposing narratives and a director who is paid not to care about either outcome. Hired actors sit on either end of the stage, while unwitting audience members strive to remain quiet. No applause should be rendered, no gasps of glory. Witnesses sit agape with fury as they stumble across their rehearsed lines. If only they had practiced just once more. If only they had more time or a dress rehearsal, then they would recite their packaged words with such eloquent delivery that the critics in the jury box would believe only them. — Elizabeth L. Silver

Jin rejoins us, and we march on. There are tears streaming down my face now, along with the sweat. They're from the physical pain. They're from all the pain. Sometime since we started across, every last shred of my inner fortification has burned away and i feel everything; all the memories, all of my pushed-down, blocked-out joys and sorrows and regrets lick up and down my insides, matching the searing of my muscles, the agony of a forest burned to the ground, the awfulness of the mother and baby raccoons. I weep and walk and climb and stumble, and my arms and shoulders and abs and back and legs and feet scream. — Danielle Younge-Ullman

The heron must be used to people, and yet it never lets you get too close. Draw parallel to it with the width of one of the marsh's holding ponds between you, and it will duck its head, eyeing you with suspicion, then fly. I cannot approach the heron, certainly could never touch it; I can only look for it, entranced.
This is how I understand the divine, and why I continue to seek it in the resolutely non-human world, with which we nonetheless recognize a numinous kinship. Sometimes, it will turn and lock eyes with you, lifting you out of yourself, changing everything. Other times, it will give you the side-eye and swoop away, leaving you longing for retreating beauty. You might not see it every single time you go looking, or where you expect to find it. No matter how common the experience, every time you stumble across mystery, or independent wild being, it is a surprise and a miracle. And every day, you can look." - Sara Amis, "A Daily Heron — John Halstead

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across. — Mike Leigh

The way to "find" the perfect career is to give up the notion that you will ever find it, stumble across it, or that it will somehow magically find you, and to get to work designing it. — Nicholas Lore

Soulmates are a reward, not a certainty. I think you have to earn them. And I believe, if you're one of the bastards lucky enough to stumble across yours, that you have to fight for them with everything you have, — Julie Johnson

Young people have grown up watching so much content, and just to find something that they haven't seen before: that's the dream. When you stumble across a show, and you say 'I haven't seen this,' that's what we want. — Josh Thomas

Children are not being assaulted by images that appear on a computer screen. Any Internet user knows it is quite difficult to stumble across pornography. — Russ Feingold

I think the ambiguity of similarity and difference is very powerful. It's the same scene in different times of year read across the grid, and, of course, different locations reading vertically. But you can get confused and lost in the series. You force the mind, which is always comparing and contrasting, to stumble ... That ambiguity is very powerful. One is getting lost and refinding oneself. — David Hockney

The beautiful unruliness of literature is what makes it so much fun to wander through: you read Jane Austen and you say, oh, that is IT. And then you turn around and read Sterne, and you say, Man, that is IT. And then you wander across a century or so, and you run into Kafka, or Calvino, or Cortazar, and you say, well that is IT. And then you stroll through what Updike called the grottos of Ulysses, and after that you consort with Baldwin or Welty or Spencer, or Morrison, or Bellow or Fitzgerald and then back to W. Shakespeare, Esq; the champ, and all the time you feel the excitement of being in the presence of IT. And when you yourself spend the good time writing, you are not different in kind than any of these people, you are part of that miracle of human invention. So get to work. Get on with IT, no matter how difficult IT is. Every single gesture, every single stumble, every single uninspired-feeling hour, is worth IT. Richard Bausch — Kathy Fish

During their lifetimes, every man and woman will stumble across a great opportunity. Sadly, most of them will simply pick themselves up, dust themselves down and carry on as if nothing ever happened. — Winston S. Churchill

Is anything truly impossible? Or is it that the path to our goals appears too unclear to follow? It seems to me that if you seek hard enough, pray hard enough, you usually stumble across a scattering of breadcrumbs that marks the trail leading to the goal you once considered beyond your reach. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I read books all the time. I'm just half looking for something to do; I mostly just read for pleasure. Occasionally I stumble across something that could be a movie, but I don't put a book down just because I don't see a movie in it, either. — Andrew Dominik

Ten minutes ago, Frank though he was going to prison. Now he knows he's not, and part of him thinks he should just be glad he's getting out of this at all, but he's not. He's not glad. He's furious. He's known the world is broken for a long time, he's known that, but sometimes he's amazed at how broken; even now, at this point in his life, nearing fifty years old, he can stumble across something that makes him realize all over again that the world is not only broken, but beyond fixing. No amount of glue can ever make it right. And yet, you have to focus on your little part of it, don't you? You have to focus on your little corner of the world and glue what cracks you can. Otherwise there's no hope at all. — Ryan David Jahn

I did have a couple of people asking me to illustrate their MC in a hope to widen the exposure, unfortunately the messages weren't a good fit, so I couldn't oblige. And I didn't really want to become a matchmaking service. Someone posted a missed connection "I like your blog" which was directed at me ... that was kind of fun to stumble across. — Sophie Blackall

He recognized his own fear in them, and now that he knows what it looks like he sees it everywhere - in the man who pumps gas across the street, in the teenage girls who stumble down the sidewalk, in the transvestite prostitute who steps forward and back, indecisive, at the intersection while Andres prays for the light to turn green. It is a fear that he can't get away from, and seeing it in others doesn't make him feel any safer. — Natalia Sylvester

Some people are lucky enough to stumble across the right path straight away; most of us only discover what the right one is by going down the wrong one first. — Toby Young

I used to think that nails-down-a-chalkboard was the worst sound in the world. Then I moved on to people-eating-cereal-on-the-phone. But only this week did I stumble across the rightful winner: it's the sound of a baggage carousel coming to a grinding halt, having reunited every passenger on your flight with their luggage, except for you. — Sloane Crosley

I want to stumble across something on the sidewalk and pretend she dropped it: a flower petal, a scarf. And then I want to set it on fire. — Tiffanie DeBartolo

I missed the moonlight, the stars. There were times I forgot that there was an entire universe above the clouds. It was as if a shroud had been pulled around the Earth. Over time, we would forget everything that we had once struggled so hard to observe and learn and prove. We would forget about Jupiter and its churning storms. We would forget about the Big Dipper, about Halley's comet. We would stumble across telescopes in old department stores and never give them a second look, never wonder about the things they once made large. — Jason Gurley

If the human race has ever invented an institution more effective in the propagation of intellectual and ethical cripples than the nobility, I have yet to stumble across it. — Daniel Polansky

I stumble across the sea of tarmac, finding pavement, concealment and a brick wall. Palms brace against the scrubby surface. My stomach churns and then bubbles over, burning my throat as acrid yellow acid spills from my lips in frothy discomposure. It splatters the pavement like a spray of blood. — Rebecca Clare Smith

If for some reason academics outside the church choose to study any or all of the pieces into which Scripture falls in their hands, they are of course at liberty to do so. They are even at liberty to take the whole canon, as this odd collection the Christians once put together, and investigate why the church might have done that, what arbitrary sense she might have been imposing on the collected bits. And the church may happily receive any and all insights such investigations stumble across or information they make available. But such activity is not and cannot be exegesis of texts from the volume we call the Bible. — Ellen F. Davis

There is a string that connects us that is not visible to the eye. Maybe every person has more than one soul they are connected to, and all over the world there are those invisible strings ... Maybe the chances that you'll find each and every one of your soul mates is slim. But sometimes you're lucky enough to stumble across one. And you feel a tug. And it's not so much a choice to love them though their flaws and through your differences, but rather you love them without even trying. You love their flaws. — Tarryn Fisher

What did Ethan care? _He_ had no trouble navigating. This was because he'd lived all his life in one house, was Macon's theory; while a person who'd been moved around a great deal never acquired a fixed point of reference but wandered forever in a fog - adrift upon the planet, helpless, praying that just by luck he might stumble across his destination. — Anne Tyler

I remember thinking I just want more. This isn't it. Fame is not the goal. Money is not the goal. To be able to know how to get peace of mind, how to be happy, is something you don't just stumble across. You've got to search for it. — George Harrison

How well I remember my first encounter with The Devil'ss Brew. I happened to stumble across a case of bourbon - and went right on stumbling for several days thereafter. — W.C. Fields

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place. — David Bowie