Sufficed Quotes & Sayings

Odd, the years it took to learn one simple fact: that the prize just ahead, the next job, publication, love affair, marriage always seemed to hold the key to satisfaction but never, in the longer run, sufficed. — Carolyn Gold Heilbrun

the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write 'The Sound and the Fury' or 'The Sun Also Rises.' But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length. — Jonathan Franzen

You don't survive in me
because of memories;
nor are you mine because
of a lovely longing's strength.
What does make you present
is the ardent detour
that a slow tenderness
traces in my blood.
I do not need
to see you appear;
being born sufficed for me
to lose you a little less. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The power of words is immense. A well-chosen word has often sufficed to stop a flying army, to change defeat into victory and to save an empire. — Emile De Girardin

How do you end a story that's not yours? Add another sentence where there is a pause? Infiltrate the story with a comma when really there should have been a period? Punctuate with an exclamation point where a period would have sufficed? What if you kill something breathing and breathe life into something the author wanted to eliminate? How do you get inside the mind of a person who isn't there? Fill the shoes of someone who will never again fill his own? — Shaila M. Abdullah

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love. — Friedrich Nietzsche

His hands tightened on her shoulders as the truth washed over him. My God, she really had told him yes.
He opened his mouth to ask if she was certain then didn't. If he did, she might change her mind, and he had no intention of giving her that opportunity. Underneath his hands, her shoulders quivered. She raised her gaze to him again, and his heart plunged into the depths. She had her lower lip trapped between her teeth, and her eyes were tormented pools of blue green. His heart broke just looking at her.
She was not in love with him. He knew that. Her acceptance of him had nothing to do with the sort of desperate longing he had for her. Not that he hadn't known that the first time he proposed to her, but to have her say yes out of despair added an edge of pain to his euphoria. He knew she wasn't indifferent to him, after all, and for the moment, that sufficed to keep the hurt at arm's
length. — Carolyn Jewel

I kept my word. An hour or two sufficed to sketch my own portrait in crayons; and in less than a fortnight I had completed an ivory miniature of an imaginary Blanche Ingram. It looked a lovely face enough, and when compared with the real head in chalk, the contrast was as great as self-control could desire. I derived benefit from the task: it had kept my head and hands employed, and had given force and fixedness to the new impressions I wished to stamp indelibly on my heart. — Charlotte Bronte

Starting in 1897, Henry Havelock Ellis devoted six volumes to it: his pioneering Studies in the Psychology of Sex, sprinkled with case studies of unexpected explicitness and perversity. One memorable phrase from volume four, Sexual Selection in Man: the contact of a dog's tongue with her mouth alone afterward sufficed to evoke sexual pleasure. — Erik Larson

He had but one consolation, that she had loved him, that her eyes had told him so, that although she did not know his name she knew his heart, and that perhaps, wherever she now was, in whatever undiscoverable place, she loved him still. Perhaps she even thought of him constantly as he did of her. Sometimes, in those unaccountable moments known to every lover, when the heart feels a strange stirring of delight although there is not cause for anything but grief, he reflected: 'It is her own thoughts that are reaching me! ... And perhaps my thoughts are reaching her!'
Fancies such as these, which an instant later he brushed aside, nevertheless sufficed to kindle a glow in him which was something near to hope. — Victor Hugo

The Jedi were certainly aware of the tremendous potential, but they restrained themselves."
"Precisely what they did with the Force, as some have said. If they had made use of their full powers, the war would have ended in a heartbeat. And the galaxy would be in a different state entirely. For all their purported objectivity, they weren't scientists, they were mystics. For a thousand generations that sufficed. Notions of right and wrong can no longer be dictated by a select group to safeguard some personal vision of the truth. — James Luceno

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz
everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom ... — Evelyn Waugh

The generation of Isaiah did not require the detailed description; his account, "I saw the Lord," &c., sufficed. The generation of the Babylonian exile wanted to learn all the details ... Isaiah was so familiar with it that he did not consider it necessary to communicate it to others as a new thing, especially as it was well known to the intelligent. — Maimonides

It may occasion surprise that the decree of a temporal power sufficed to give the classics a position that can be compared in other cultures to the place of sacred scriptures inspired by divine revelation. — Hellmut Wilhelm

Did you forget the dressing room at the mall?"
Forget? I have wet dreams involving that day. "That's not my fault. You asked how you looked in those jeans."
"Good would have sufficed. Attempting to take them off wasn't necessary."
"They did look good. Good enough that I wanted to touch, and then I wanted to touch more."
Echo laughs, and the sound warms my heart. "They have security cameras. People go to jail over stuff like that."
I roll onto my side and drape my leg over hers. "I had you covered from sight. Very covered." Backed her up against the wall and covered her body with every inch of mine.
That siren smile that I love so much crosses her face. Her fingers reach up and trace the line of my jaw. "You are the most impossible person I know."
"Damn straight. — Katie McGarry

But although we have noticed the ark as being the first ship, we cannot with propriety place it in the front of the history of navigation. After the flood the ark seems to have been soon forgotten, or at least imperfectly remembered, and men reverted to their little canoes and clumsy boats, which sufficed for all their limited wants. It was not until about a thousand years later in the world — R.M. Ballantyne

I love you," I tell him again. "I see that," he laughs, kissing me. "Simple words would have sufficed. You didn't need to knock me down with it." I giggle. "Shut up and kiss me. — Courtney Cole

He had thought providing for his wife was the greatest expression of devotion. Somehow it hadn't sufficed. How could I have loved her more? I never touched another woman. His sorrow was this: There was something she had needed, something she had tried to call forth from within him, that he did not possess. — Kiana Davenport

Here he was holding the clear proof of the existence of other skies, but at the same time without having to ascend beyond the celestial spheres, for he intuited many worlds in a piece of coral. Was there any need to calculate the number of forms which the atoms of the Universe could create
burning at the stake all those who said their number was not finite
when it sufficed to meditate for years on one of these marine objects to realize how the deviation of a single atom, whether willed by God or prompted by Chance, could generate inconceivable Milky Ways? — Umberto Eco

This rose is not so fragrant as a summer flower, but it has stood through hardships none of them could bear: the cold rain of winter has sufficed to nourish it, and its faint sun to warm it; the bleak winds have not blanched it, or broken its stem, and the keen frost has not blighted it ... It is still fresh and blooming as a flower can be, with the cold snow even now on its petals. - Will you have it? — Anne Bronte

Whatever I think or feel inevitably turns into a form of inertia. Thought, which for other people is a compass to guide action, is for me its microscope, making me see whole universes to span where a footstep would have sufficed, as if Zeno's argument about the impossibility of crossing a given space - which, being infinitely divisible, is therefore infinite - were a strange drug that had intoxicated my psychological self. And feeling, which in other people enters the will like a hand in a glove, or like a fist in the guard of a sword, was always in me another form of thought - futile like a rage that makes us tremble so much we can't move, or like a panic (the panic, in my case, of feeling too intensely) that freezes the frightened man in his tracks, when his fright should make him flee. — Fernando Pessoa

Never strike anyone so old, small or weak that verbal abuse would have sufficed. — P. J. O'Rourke

In a foolish and loud manner he had argued politics; he had been rude in his disagreeing, and only the adroit tact of his host had sufficed to save the evening. How much I have to learn, Childan thought. They're so graceful and polite. And I - the white barbarian. It is true. — Philip K. Dick

But she could not breathe long on the heights; there had been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength: what she craved, and really felt herself entitled to, was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest. Hitherto her intermittent impulses of resistance had sufficed to maintain her self-respect. — Edith Wharton

Little things recall us to earth. The clock struck in the hall; that sufficed. I turned from the moon and the stars, opened a side door, and went in. — Charlotte Bronte

I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover 25 miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. — Bertrand Russell

it is not clear that the government needed dragnets to catch Zazi. If Zazi was e-mailing with terrorists under surveillance, a search warrant would have sufficed to capture his communications. Similarly, — Julia Angwin

The ineffable utterance of one solitary man, absent, perhaps dead (Swann did not know whether Vinteuil were still alive), breathed out above the rites of those two hierophants, sufficed to arrest the attention of three hundred minds, and made of that stage on which a soul was thus called into being one of the noblest altars on which a supernatural ceremony could be performed. — Marcel Proust

I shall die in the belief that to make France free, republican and prosperous, a little ink would have sufficed - and only one guillotine. — Camille Desmoulins

Unlike modern military codes, ancient texts are almost never purposely misleading, purposely scrambled ... indeed, literacy was so uncommon until classical times that the very writing of a message sufficed to keep it from almost everybody. — E. J. W. Barber

We have a long distance to travel,' said the Angel of Death to our friend Gil, as soon as they had left the Villa. 'I will order my chariot.' And he struck the ground with his foot.
A hollow rumbling, like that which precedes an earthquake, sounded under the ground. Presently there rose round the two friends an ash-colored cloud of vapor, in the midst of which appeared a species of ivory chariot, resembling the chariots we see in the bas-reliefs of antiquity.
A brief glance would have sufficed (we will not disguise the fact from out readers) to show that the chariot was not made of ivory, but solely and simply of human bones polished and joined together with exquisite skill, but retaining still their natural form.
The Angel of Death gave his hand to Gil and they ascended the chariot, which rose into the air like the balloons of the present day, but with the difference that it was propelled by the will of its occupants. ("The Friend of Death") — Pedro Antonio De Alarcon

But, in these later days, much greater convulsions had overwhelmed her. It sufficed for Tietjens to approach her to make her feel as if her whole body was drawn towards him as, being near a terrible height, you are drawn towards it. Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid itself. The moon so draws the tides. — Ford Madox Ford

If I can find out God, then I shall find Him,If none can find Him, then I shall sleep soundly,Knowing how well on earth your love sufficed me, A lamp in darkness. — Sara Teasdale

Daisuke was of course equipped with conversation that, even if they went further, would allow him to retreat as if nothing had happened. He had always wondered at the conversations recorded in Western novels, for to him they were too bald, too self indulgent, and moreover, too unsubtly rich. However they read in the original, he thought they reflected a taste that could not be translated into Japanese. Therefore, he had not the slightest intention of using imported phrases to develop his relationship with Michiyo. Between the two of them at least, ordinary words sufficed perfectly well. But the danger was of slipping from point A to point B without realizing it. Daisuke managed to stand his ground only by a hair's breadth. When he left, Michiyo saw him to the entranceway and said, "Do come again, please? It's so lonely. — Soseki Natsume

So, you missed me then?"
"With every fiber of my being."
"A simple yes would have sufficed. — Samantha Towle

The only weapon I had was my dancing.
With that I fought like a general without an army.
If I could have saved all the energy I wasted on my struggle
it would have sufficed me to cover a dozen ballets. — Maya Plisetskaya

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. — Friedrich Engels