Until Later Quotes & Sayings

Lord, I don't understand it, but when a person does something wrong, it never feels wrong until later. It's never as evil as you'd imagined. — Michael Lee West

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it. — George Bernard Shaw

I'm not one of those who spring up yelling, "Yippee! Another day!" I'll grumble and sulk around a couple of hours, reading newspapers and trying to pick out an idea I might do something with on the show. But I don't really start functioning until noon or later; then about two I go to the studio and the pace begins to quicken. — Johnny Carson

Son of a bitch!" "What is it?" asked Coleman. "Our flight's delayed!" "But only fifteen minutes," said Coleman. "I've seen this movie before. 'Fifteen minutes' is code for 'at least three to five hours.' They know the plane's stuck in Pittsburgh, where they wrestled another drunk pilot to the runway, but they don't want an open passenger revolt, so they incrementally string us along fifteen minutes at a time, until you're across the international date line." Serge paced in front of the departure screen. Fifteen minutes later, Serge grabbed Coleman and pointed. "Sweet Jesus! They just added another fifteen minutes! — Tim Dorsey

not if Shannon is over her illness. Come, Dytyna. We discuss your performance now." "When will we know if I'll be competing?" "We will not know until Monday when we check in at the Olympic arena. Coach Taylor will know then." "I'm going back to the hotel to call your father, Kerri. We plan on meeting for lunch then will head on over to the hockey arena. Two kids in the Olympics! Whoa. I'll see you later." She leaned down and gave Kerri a hug before she kissed her forehead. "Stay out of trouble." "I can hardly get into any trouble in the Olympic village, Mom." At almost seventeen, Kerri was still able to feel embarrassed at receiving her mother's counsel, and she thought that her mother's advice was unfounded. The village was closed off, after all, from the rest of Turin and from the fray of the crowds that converged upon the venues. She watched her mother walk away before she stood up and adjusted the strap — Eleanor Webb

It was not until much later when, after a deep and satisfying orgasm, I suddenly realised the true meaning of the fairy tale and the nature of the magic kiss of which it speaks. — Germaine Greer

A monster crosses over into the everyday world. The mortals struggle and show great courage, but it's no use. The monster kills first the guilty, then the innocent, until finally only one remains. The Last Boy, the Last Girl. There is a final battle. The Last One suffers great wounds, but in the final moment vanquishes the monster. Only later does he or she recognize that this is the monster's final trick; the scars run deep, and the awareness of the truth grows like an infection. The Last One knows that the monster isn't dead, only sent to the other side. There it waits until it can slip into the mundane world again. Perhaps next time it will be a knife-wielding madman, or a fanged beast, or some nameless tentacled thing. It's the monster with a thousand faces. The details matter only to the next victims. — Daryl Gregory

Mrs. Campbell once attempted to smuggle her pet Pekingese through customs by tucking him inside the upper part of her cape. "Everything was going splendidly," she later remarked, "until my bosom barked." — Mrs. Patrick Campbell

Under the Nazis enormous numbers of people were compelled to spend an enormous amount of time marching in serried ranks from point A to point B and back again to point A. "This keeping of the whole population on the march seemed to be a senseless waste of time and energy. Only much later," adds Hermann Rauschning, "was there revealed in it a subtle intention based on a well-judged adjustment of ends and means. Marching diverts men's thoughts. Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of individuality. Marching is the indispensable magic stroke performed in order to accustom the people to a mechanical, quasi-ritualistic activity until it becomes second nature. — Aldous Huxley

Caspian felt sure that he would hate the new Tutor, but when the new Tutor arrived about a week later he turned out to be the sort of person it is almost impossible not to like. He was the smallest, and also the fattest, man Caspian had ever seen. He had a long, silvery, pointed beard which came down to his waist, and his face, which was brown and covered with wrinkles, looked very wise, very ugly, and very kind. His voice was grave and his eyes were merry so that, until you got to now him really well, it was hard to know when he was joking and when he was serious. His name was Doctor Cornelius. — C.S. Lewis

If you are with a fully enlightened being, a jivan mukta, liberated soul, the quality of light is so clear, that you don't really know that it is there until later. — Frederick Lenz

She took off her engagement and
wedding rings and walked over to me. "I don't want anything to happen to these while I'm there."
I clasped both of her hands in mine. "It's not the rings I'm worried about."
A faint smile crossed her lips, and even though the face was different, there was a feel to that smile
that was uniquely Sydney. "I'll be fine ... but I want you to hold on to these for me until I get back."
"Deal," I said in a low voice that only she could hear, "but I get to put them back on you."
"Okay," she said.
"On my knees," I added.
"Okay."
"And we both have to be nake - "
"Adrian," she said warningly.
"We'll discuss the terms later," I said with a wink. — Richelle Mead

We all lose our innocence soon enough; it's inescapable. Most of us aren't emotionally or intellectually ready for it until our thirties or even later, however, so when one loses it prematurely, in childhood and adolescence, through divorce or the sudden early death of a parent, it can leave one fixated on that loss for a lifetime. Because it's premature, it feels unnatural, violent and unnecessary, a permanent, gratuitous wounding, and it leaves one angry at the world, — Russell Banks

I read a lot of older children's books when I was a kid, and you wouldn't believe how many sugar-coated tracts I sucked the sugar off and cheerfully ran off, spitting out the message undigested. (Despite going to church several times every Sunday for my who childhood, I never figured out Aslan was Jesus until told later.) — Jo Walton

Religion grows with the intelligence of man, but all religions of the past and probably all of the future will sooner or later become petrified forms instead of living helps to mankind. Until that time comes, however, if religion of any name or nature makes man more happy, comfortable, and able to live peaceably with his brothers, it is good. — Luther Burbank

Why do those men hate us? They hate us because they need us, they fear us, they understand how much control it takes to keep us in line, to keep us good girls with our hymens intact until it's time for them to fuck us into mothers who raise future generations of misogynists to forever fuel their patriarchy. They hate us because we are at once their temptation and their salvation from that patriarchy, which they must sooner or later realize hurts them, too. They hate us because they know that once we rid ourselves of the alliance of State and Street that works in tandem to control us, we
will demand a reckoning. — Mona Eltahawy

Nothing you do in the White House matters. You know why not? Because as far as the mass of voting morons is concerned, while you're in office, you'll still be the worst single president they've ever had until you stop. Then it's some other poor bastard's turn. And even that doesn't matter, because ten, twenty years later, they'll look back on you, and wonder why they didn't appreciate you when they had you ... You don't get to make a difference. You don't get to do jack shit. You know what you get? ... You get an entry in the history book, and every 15 minutes, every day at Disneyworld, an animatronic puppet wearing your face will wave or nod when the spotlight hits it. — Neil Gaiman

People who choose to earn money first, people who put off their real plans until later, until they are rich, are not necessarily wrong. People who want only to live, and who reckon living is absolute freedom, the exclusive pursuit of happiness, the sole satisfaction of their desires and instincts, the immediate enjoyment of the boundless riches of the world [ ... ] such people will always be unhappy. It is true [ ... ] that there are people for whom this kind of dilemma does not arise, or hardly arises, either because they are too poor and have no requirements beyond a slightly better diet, slightly better housing, slightly less work, or because they are too rich, from the start, to understand the import or even the meaning of such a distinction. But nowadays and in our part of the world, more and more people are neither rich nor poor: they dream of wealth, and could become wealthy; and that is where their misfortunes begin."
-from "Things: A Story of the Sixties — Georges Perec

My whole family's gonna be set for life and I'm not stopping rappin until that happens. I already know I got a five year plan. I'm 26 now and I'm gonna bow out on my 31st birthday. Peace, later, holla, I'm gone. — Jayceon Terrell Taylor

One of the innate dilemmas of biography is that life is not much like a book. It rarely contains a clearly stated thesis, coherently developed. Life sprawls, stumbles, advances, retreats, gropes for the light switch, and once in a while makes intuitive leaps whose import is barely understood until later, if ever, by the leaper. Life seems to me an improvisation. — Jan Swafford

The short film project I just finished for W Hotels and Intel, I didn't have my script finished until a few days before we began filming. We edited it very quickly and now it's up online. It was great to conceive an idea and have it premiere just a few weeks later, compared to a feature, which takes a year or more. — Roman Coppola

Her smile was genuine-looking and later he would mull her question over and over in his head until it mushroomed into something larger. — Anthony Doerr

God is a good horseman. He waits while we circle the fences of our lives - whatever they are, whether it be a bad childhood, or a destructive habit, family problems, an addiction, a personal tragedy, an inability to forgive someone else or to allow ourselves to ask forgiveness, or believe we deserve it. The Good Horseman waits, and each time we turn and look at Him, He stretches out His hand, slow and quiet, until finally, sooner or later, we reach for it, and we come to the center with Him, and find that peace was waiting there all along. — Lisa Wingate

Something--he wondered later if it was simply his youth--something that had weighed upon him until that moment broke off him, the way a piece of rock slides slowly into the sea and disappears in a spray of foam. — Patrick Modiano

If you wish to fault the administration, it is that we didn't have a clear picture and we probably didn't do as clear a job explaining that we did not have a clear picture until days later ... — Hillary Clinton

I don't even plan things until later, so no I got no plans. — Ron White

But nothing is lasting in this world. Even joy begins to fade after only one minute. Two minutes later, and it is weaker still, until finally it is swallowed up in our everyday, prosaic state of mind, just as a ripple made by a pebble gradually merges with the smooth surface of the water. — Nikolai Gogol

Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later. — Allan Bloom

You didn't hear Yello until later in the night in the bondage clubs. Things would start getting crazy and that's when you'd hear Yello. It was bad. — Margaret Cho

(Plants on the disc, while including the categories known commonly as annuals, which were sown this year to come up later this year, biennials, sown this year to grow next year, and perennials, sown this year to grow until further notice, also included a few rare re-annuals which, because of an unusual four-dimensional twist in their genes, could be planted this year to come up last year. The vul nut vine was particularly exceptional in that it could flourish as many as eight years prior to its seed actually being sown. Vul nut wine was reputed to give certain drinkers an insight into the future which was, from the nut's point of view, the past. Strange but true.) — Terry Pratchett

I loved to write; in my late teens I had a 'zine. But it wasn't until I went back to school, later on in my 20s, that I actually saw that I had writing talent. — Sonja Sohn

My mama taught me the most important lesson of all: "Sometimes you don't know why things happen until later." She still gets me through the dark days even to this day, because of that one day we sat in the grass, with my heart broken to smithereens, and she told me that one simple phrase that changed my life. — Jennifer Megan Varnadore

His boss, Isaac (Robert Guillaume), agrees but tells him to do it anyway "because it's television and this is how it's done." Dan replies, "Yeah, well, sitting in the back of the bus was how it was done until a forty-two-year-old lady moved up front." A few minutes later Isaac looks Dan in the eye and tells him, "Because I love you I can say this. No rich young white guy has ever gotten anywhere with me comparing himself to Rosa Parks." Finally, the voice of reason, which of course was heard on a canceled network TV series on cable. — Sarah Vowell

Eight hundred and more years later, more than three and a half thousand miles away, and now more than one thousand years ago, a storm fell upon our ancestors' city like a bomb. Their childhoods slipped into the water and were lost, the piers built of memories on which they once ate candy and pizza, the boardwalks of desire under which they hid from the summer sun and kissed their first lips. The roofs of houses flew through the night sky like disoriented bats, and the attics where they stored their past stood exposed to the elements until it seemed that everything they once were had been devoured by the predatory sky. Their secrets drowned in flooded basements and they could no longer remember them. Their power failed them. Darkness fell. — Salman Rushdie

Good decision-making is like playing chess and you must avoid making hasty decisions without thinking of how that particular decision will impact on different aspects of your work and organization. The worst kind of decision-making is to decide to delay a difficult decision until later or to pass it to someone else to have to make. You will never excel and be valued by your colleagues if you get into these habits of procrastination and passing responsibility to others. — Nigel Cumberland

Normally you'll have a structure to a song. You'll have an intro to a verse to a pre-chorus to a chorus, kinda repeat that, maybe there's a bridge, then you'll go out on a chorus - that's the quintessential song structure - sometimes you might do a fake-out, re-do a pre-chorus but the chorus doesn't come until later, but for the most part you follow these tried and true structures. — Frank Iero

She'd made the best decision of her life when she convinced the easy-going David that, yes, he really did want to take her on a date. One year later they were inseparable.
He would make a patient, persistent father. He clearly adored Eve, but he also refused to put up with any of her drama. They solved their problems in quiet, respectful voices. Even Eve's father had seemed convinced that Eve and David would be together until they were old and forgetful. — Debra Anastasia

I started playing instruments. Writing didn't come until later. I didn't know how to play a keyboard but I'd listen to hits off the radio, learn them, then my hands would be ready to play. — Amanda Perez

As I grew up, I was interested in other areas, too, especially literature. It became a major love of mine. Later, it became a difficult choice for me as to whether to major in music or literature. It wasn't until my 30s that I began a profession in music. — Tom Glazer

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out. — Robert Morgan

The error in this conclusion may be most simply demonstrated by means of an actual example. Let us select for this purpose the monetary history of Austria, which Laughlin also uses as an illustration. From 1859 onwards the Austrian National Bank was released from the obligation to convert its notes on demand into silver, and nobody could tell when the State paper-money issued in 1866 would be redeemed, or even if it would be redeemed at all. It was not until the later 'nineties that the transition to metallic money was completed by the actual resumption of cash payments on the part of the Austro-Hungarian Bank. — Ludwig Von Mises

Your life is right now! It's not later! It's not in that time of retirement. It's not when the lover gets here. It's not when you've moved into the new house. It's not when you get the better job. Your life is right now. It will always be right now. You might as well decide to start enjoying your life right now, because it's not ever going to get better than right now-until it gets better right now! — Esther Hicks

Love is not first a feeling. Though the feelings come later and grow thick in the basic loam of love, they don't constitute the sum and substance of love. Love is doing whatever good God says you must do for another, to please God, whether (at first) it pleases you or not. You must do so because He says so; and you don't wait until you feel like doing so. Love begins with obedience toward God in which one gives to another whatever the other needs. Love is not a gooey, sticky sentimental thing; it is hard to love. Often it hurts to love. Love meant going to the cross through the garden of Gethsemane. Christ did not feel like dying for your sins, Christian, but He did so nonetheless. The Scriptures teach that he endured the cross while focusing on the subsequent joy that it would bring. — Jay E. Adams

Yeah, my dad was in the foreign service. We lived in India, Indonesia and Africa, and we traveled a lot from those places. I was 10 when we moved back, and I felt like the odd guy out. It wasn't until later that I appreciated it. But coming back I didn't know any TV shows or music, which was even worse. — Dylan Walsh

My father slapped my thighs with a variety of meats until I began to cry and sulked in the corner. I later became a musician — Thom Yorke

I think, for a shy person - and I was very shy until my mid-20s - having been to an all-girls' school is not brilliant on the boyfriend front later. Because when I went to university, it was definitely like meeting a new species of people. Suddenly, at age 19, I was thinking: 'Can you speak to these people?' I was very, very nervous. — Miranda Hart

The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them, when we answer, with how we lead our lives. Sometimes what begins as bad news prompts the true path of a life, a disruptive visitor that might be thanked only later. Most of us don't change until we have to, and crisis is often what obliges us to do so. Crises are often resolved only through anew identity and new purpose, whether it's that of a nation or a single human being. — Rebecca Solnit

A bum woke up in the gutter right beside where I stood looking across the street at this place. He felt in the waist of his pants and came up with a pint bottle, half full. He tipped it up and it gurgled steadily until he'd emptied it all down into him. I was only twenty-four or -five but I already knew from experience how it tasted. And people who've kissed the feet of Christ know how it tasted. I saw everything there in the gutter
the terror and the promise. Later I spent the morning in the smoky Day Labor Division with better than a hundred men who'd learned how not to move, learned how to stay beautifully still and let their lives hurt them, white men with gray faces and black men with yellow eyes. I worked the rest of the week in a factory without ever comprehending exactly what was manufactured there, and at night I'd get drunk and shut myself in a phone booth and call the woman in Minnesota who'd broken my heart. — Denis Johnson

If I could just have him until the day was over. Just a few more hours. But he was gone. I clasped my hand tightly over my mouth and felt a trembling that started deep inside move out to make all of me shake. I had a mighty impulse, it truly was mighty, to rise to my feet and howl. To overturn the chair and nightstand, to rip at my clothes, to bring down the very walls around us. But of course I did not do that. I pulled an elemental sense of outrage back inside and smoothed it down. I forced something far too big into something far too small, and this made for a surprising and unreasonable weight, as mercury does. I noticed sounds coming from my throat, little unladylike grunts. I saw that everything I'd ever imagined about what it would feel like when was pale. Was wrong. Was the shadow and not the mountain. And then, "It's all right," I said, quickly. "It's all right." To whom? I wondered later. — Elizabeth Berg

Additionally, Adam's room had an absolutely massive bed with a plump feather tick that she knew they would put to good use.
"Shall we christen it now?" Adam whispered in her ear, his arms stealing around her from behind in spite of the footmen who were still busy bringing up their luggage. Skimming his lips over her cheek, he playfully caressed her nape in a way that never failed to drive her wild. "I could shoo them all out and lock the door. We wouldn't even have to take off our clothes, I could just tumble you down and toss up your skirts. What do you say, wife, shall I tup you now, or would you rather wait until later? — Tracy Anne Warren

But a day later, it was 'Prof Tim says low fat is a fraud,' when he was eating a tub of yoghurt at his desk for breakfast. He let that slide too. Until the following morning, when he and a packet of Simba salt-and-vinegar crisps walked out of the morning parade, and Mbali said, 'Prof Tim says it's the carbs that make you fat, you know,' and he couldn't take it any more and snapped: 'Prof Tim who?' And so she told him. Everything. About this Prof Tim Noakes who once got the whole fokken world eating pasta, and then he did an about face and said, no, carbs are what's making everyone obese, and he wrote a book of recipes, and now he was Mbali's big hero, 'Because it takes a great man to admit that he was wrong', and she had already lost so much weight and she had so much more energy, and it wasn't all that hard, she didn't miss the carbs because now she ate cauliflower rice and cauliflower mash and flax seed bread. Flax seed bread, for fuck's sake. — Deon Meyer

I read the story and reread the story, but I still could not find the universality that the little Irishman had spoken of. All I saw in the story was some Irishmen meeting in a room and talking politics. What had that to do with America, especially with my people? It was not until years later that I saw what he meant ... I began to listen, to listen closely to how they talked about their heroes, to how they talked about the dead and how great the dead had once been. I heard it everywhere. — Ulysses S. Grant

You're lucky you didn't know him back in his tech phase. There was this time in our second year when we were living in the same house. Kitchen table kept wobbling so Landis shoved this metal saucer under one of the legs. Wasn't until two weeks later we found out it was a land mine. — Benedict Jacka

Delilah, pretend that it doesn't bother you. Move on
with your life, as if nothing ever happened. Nothing moves
a man, more than a woman who acts as if he didn't mean a
thing to her when he left. It bothers them, and they often
try to make sense of it. Meanwhile, you're putting
everything you have into yourself, and well, sometimes you
just don't know why things happen until later. — Jennifer Megan Varnadore

Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later. — Richard Hell

I found another girl to pose for Myrto and then I didn't think about Rafaela much, not until a spring day years later. Or rather, I thought about her with an occasional, impersonal pang. Have you ever had a favorite cafe close? It was like that. — Ellis Avery

Squirrelflight rested her tail on his shoulder, urging him to lie still until his injuries could be treated. Brambleclaw led Stormfur and Brook up to Firestar.
The Clan leader's eyes stretched wide in surprise. "Stormfur ... and Brook! What are you doing here?"
"There'll be time to explain later," Stormfur meowed. "For now, Firestar, put us to work. — Erin Hunter

In practice, ship and iterate means that marketing programs and PR pushes should be minimal at launch. If you are in the restaurant business, you call this a soft opening. When you push the babies out of the nest, don't give them a jetpack or even a parachute - let them fly on their own. (Note: This is a metaphor.) Invest only when they get some lift. Google's Chrome is a great example of this - it launched in 2008 with minimal fanfare and practically no marketing budget and gained terrific momentum on its own, based solely on its excellence. Later, around the time the browser pushed past seventy million users, the team decided to pour fuel on the fire and approved a marketing push (and even a TV advertising campaign). But not until the product had proven itself a winner did it get fed. — Eric Schmidt

(Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn. — Erich Maria Remarque

The immediate effect of the deficit is to make you feel good, like when you go on a trip and pay later. You feel good, and then you get a hangover. The deficit makes you feel good - until you pay later. — Franco Modigliani

We were greeted by a dark-skinned man who introduced himself as Truth. We introduced ourselves as Honesty, Happiness, Honor, Witness, Serengeti , and Schnitzeldoodle. We didn't find out until later, when we met our tracker called Life, that Truth wasn't joking with us about his name. — Chelsea Handler

Each smallest act of kindness, reverberates across great distances and spans of time
affecting lives unknown to the one who's generous spirit, was the source of this good echo. Because kindness is passed on and grows each time it's passed until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage, years later, and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each expression of hatred, each act of evil. — Dean Koontz

In another telling anomaly of the meat-grinding business, many of the larger slaughterhouses will sell their product only to grinders who agree to not test their product for E. coli contamination
until after it's run through a grinder with a whole bunch of other meat from other sources ... It's like demanding of a date that she have unprotected sex with four or five other guys immediately before sleeping with you
just so she can't point the finger directly at you should she later test positive for clap. — Anthony Bourdain

You don't appreciate a lot of stuff in school until you get older. Little things like being spanked every day by a middle-aged woman: Stuff you pay good money for in later life. — Emo Philips

By the time of Athelstan the country was divided into shires, hundreds and vills or townships, precisely in order to expedite taxation. The shires of England were unique, their boundaries lasting for more than a thousand years until the administrative reorganization of 1974. The earliest of them date from the late seventh and early eighth centuries, but many of their borders lie further back in the shape of the Iron Age tribal kingdoms. So the essential continuity of England was assured. Hampshire is older than France. Other shires, like those in the midlands, were constructed later; but they are still very ancient. — Peter Ackroyd

It's funny because my life is full of this:

you think you're escaping, until you run into yourself.

Twenty-three years later it turns out that the longest way round is the shortest way home,

and I've been running in circles since the get-go.

What a riot, huh? — Changdictator

Big moments happen with the smallest actions, and sometimes it's not until later we connect the dots, but in that instant, I knew that somehow, someway Declan was going to own my heart. — Ilsa Madden-Mills

Doras II was a somewhat absentminded king, It is said, when Death came to summon him, Doras granted Death the usual formal audience and then dismissed him from his presence. Death was too embarrassed to return until many years later- Ka'a Orto'o, Gnomic Utterances — Diana Wynne Jones

Punctuality is one of the minor virtues which we do not acquire until later in life. — Virginia Woolf

My first job was to run a concessions cart. Later, I found a position at the Pacific Film Archive. Thus began a long series of jobs, each one slightly better than the last, that continued for a decade, until I sold my first novel, and still goes on, even now. — Mona Simpson

I didn't know I was depressed until years later. Actually, I went to the Minirth-Meier Clinic for ADD. I got tested for ADD. So, that's nice. It's nice to know you got ADD. So, that puts you on medication. Did that for years. Then got tested for clinical depression. So, finally when they tell you this, you go, 'ahhh, this is great.' So, now this explains events in your life and how you handle them. But our society frowns on it and they don't want their heroes to have these issues, but unfortunately I do. — Terry Bradshaw

The trouble with life is, we never know when we are in the zone, until we think back, with jealous longing, years later. — Robert Black

He liked the girls, liked to hold them around the waist, felt like a man when he did. But as for talking with them, no, no! Then he felt as though he were dealing with another species of human being, in some cases a higher one, in others a lower. He secretly admired the weak, pale, little girl and had picked her to be his wife. That was still the only way he could think of a woman - as a wife. He danced in a very chaste and proper manner, but he heard awful stories about his pals, stories he didn't understand until later. They could dance the waltz backwards around the room in a very indecent way, and they told naughty stories about the girls. — August Strindberg

I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder - I believe she stole it from her mother's Spanish maid - a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing - and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the
house her mother's voice calling her, with a rising frantic note - and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since - until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another. — Vladimir Nabokov

What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later... what the mind does after losing one's father isn't just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with. — Helen Macdonald

I did some writing for that movie. The remake of Planet of the Apes. I didn't write the script. But I wrote some lines that they ended up ... not using ... I wrote one line. I thought it would've been perfect. I don't know if anyone saw the movie. It's the scene where the ape general comes in. And they're trying to decide if they should attack right there, or wait until a little later. And I wrote: "Man these bananas are good!" But they didn't use it. I did all of that research. — Brian Regan

I suspect that many of us, if given the chance to make one person in our lives love us more, would have no trouble in choosing where to point a finger. We are all needy, all vulnerable, all terrified that perhaps that person has an excellent reason to withhold affection. We shape our purposes to make ourselves worthy and often do not see until much later how it was love - or perhaps the lack of it - that both picked us up and dropped us off at crossroads. — Kevin Hearne

until we assign a time bound purposeful task to each day, each day we wake up would be regarded as a free day;free days are however fee days which we shall pay later — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I became a member of the faculty at Northwestern University in 1965 but did not complete my thesis until two years later at a graduate ceremony at which Carnegie Institute of Technology became Carnegie-Mellon University. At Northwestern, I was mentored by the 'three Bobs:' Robert Eisner, Robert Strotz and Robert Clower. — Dale T. Mortensen

These questions are punctuated by other questions, as diverse as "Will I ever do time?" and "Did this girl have a trusting heart?" The smell of meat and blood clouds up the condo until I don't notice it anymore. And later my macabre joy sours and I'm weeping for myself, unable to find solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing "I just want to be loved," cursing the earth and everything I have been taught: principles, distinctions, choices, morals, compromises, knowledge, unity, prayer - all of it was wrong, without any final purpose. All it came down to was: die or adapt. I imagine my own vacant face, the disembodied voice coming from its mouth: These are terrible times. Maggots already writhe across the human sausage, the drool pouring from my lips dribbles over them, and still I can't tell if I'm cooking any of this correctly, because I'm crying too hard and I have never really cooked anything before. — Bret Easton Ellis

From the Greek word for spectators, theatai, the later philosophical term "theory" was derived, and the word "theoretical" until a few hundred years ago meant "contemplating," looking upon something from the outside, from a position implying a view that is hidden from those who take part in the spectacle and actualize it. The inference to be drawn from this early distinction between doing and understanding is obvious: as a spectator you may understand the "truth" of what the spectacle is about; but the price you have to pay is withdrawal from participating in it. — Hannah Arendt

We match each other stroke for stroke until I get a hit on her right arm.

She tries to switch sword arms, but I jab my scim at her wrist faster than she can parry. Her scim goes flying, and I tackle her. Her white-blonde hair tumbles free of her bun.

"Surrender!" I pin her down at the wrists, but she trashes and rips one arm free, scrabbling for a dagger at her waist. Steel stabs at my ribs, and seconds later, I am on my back with a blade at my throat.

"Ha!" She leans down, her hair falling around us like a shimmering silver curtain. — Sabaa Tahir

Gideon and I sit there in the dark, wordless for a while, only our ragged breaths disturbing the silence. Memories of my sister overwhelm me - I see her impish grin as she leans over me at the orphanage, tugging on my hair until I wake up. I remember us climbing up to the roof as kids, sitting cross-legged next to the herbs and vegetables our caretakers were growing while we read the English books Rose had "borrowed" from her class at school. And then there was L.A. - all of our hope for a better life so quickly crushed, but Rose never let despair overtake her. She was there after every single night to hold me until the pain went away. And later, when I got numb to it all, she still made a point of holding me, of promising me that one day things would be different. — Paula Stokes

Them. We were the persons who made this good beginning, and it was not until two years later, when we had made the conquest, and introduced good morals and better manners among the inhabitants, that the pious Franciscan brothers arrived, and three or four years after the virtuous monks of the Dominican order, who further continued the good work, and spread Christianity through the country. The first part of the work, however, next to the Almighty, was done by us, the true Conquistadores, who subdued the country, and by the Brothers of Charity, who accompanied — Bernal Diaz Del Castillo

Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked. — Henry Miller

Not until, years later, I found my true interest in life did I discover that I could master a subject, no matter how difficult, if it helped me in what I wanted to do. — Lincoln Ellsworth

Jocks were pretty much exempt from the standards that bound the rest of us. Teachers and administrators humor them because it's in everyone's interests to coax them through school and get them out of the building. Since it's unethical to turn them loose on society, they get sent to college to be kept out of the mix until their frontal lobes develop more fully. As enticement they are given sports scholarships that will later amount to nothing, not even good health. — Hilary Thayer Hamann

Truth be told, it hurt when I fell in love with Tack over tequila and he kicked me out of bed. But until that moment, I didn't realize the hurt that burned deeper was seeing him with the brunette only a day later. He'd explained it. I hadn't made an impression on him, and clearly that had changed since. — Kristen Ashley

It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there. — William Golding

Did Garrick hunt dragon treasure in this cave, too?"
"Of course. He even found some of the dragon's gold."
Her head reared back. "No, he didn't."
"Oh, he did." Wynter's expression was one of complete sincerity. For an instant, he almost had her believing the dragon's gold was real, until he said, "I know because I put it there myself. Same as my father did when I was a boy."
A laugh broke from her lips. "Did Garrick know?"
"Of course not. Not until much later. That would have ruined the magic. — C.L. Wilson

Seeking more information, I walked through the market listening to the gossip and discovered that our new general, the man sent to quell the unrest in the east, was the second son of a provincial tax collector whose only claims to recognition were that he had commanded some legions in Britain in the heady, early days of the invasion, that his brother had once stood for consul, and that he had been a governor in some African province, where the locals had thrown turnips at him.
Despairing, I returned to the house, and that despair deepened later when Horgias came home with the news that our new paragon of martial virtue had until recently been hiding in Greece, in disgrace for having fallen asleep during one of Nero's recitals in the theatre. — M.C. Scott

Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn't even know he's been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off. — Margaret Atwood

Her mind moved around and around the subject, moving with a kind of fuzzy firmness. With no coherent thought process, she arrived at a conviction - a habit with the basically insecure; an insecurity whose seeds are invariably planted earlier, in under or over-protectiveness, in a distrust in parental authority which becomes all authority. It can later, with maturity - a flexible concept - be laughed away, dispelled by determined clear thinking. Or it can be encouraged by self-abusive resentment and brooding self-pity. It can grow ever greater until the original authority becomes intolerable, and a change becomes imperative. Not to a radical one in thinking; that would be too troublesome, too painful. The change is simply to authority in another guise which, in time, and under any great stress, must be distrusted and resented even more than the first. — Jim Thompson

Have you ever heard a five-year-old recite the Pledge of Allegiance, Arthur? It's creepy as hell. Their enunciation is perfect, but they have no idea what kind of promise they're making, of what's being called for. No one tells you until later that breaking your words amounts to treason. No one tells you until later that you can't take it back. I was having my own treasonous thoughts as I drove. They were half formed, but went a little like this: asking something like that from a person ought not to be allowed. — Alyson Foster

Abraham Lincoln wasn't much of a dancer. "Miss Todd, I should like to dance with you in the worst way," he told his future wife. Miss Todd later said to a friend, "He certainly did."

"John Quincy Adams was a first-rate swimmer. Once when he was skinny-dipping in the Potomac River, a women reporter snatched his clothes and sat on them until he gave her an interview."

"(Andrew Johnson couldn't read until he was fourteen! He didn't learn to write until after he was married!) — Judith St. George

Hen Anne stopped and talked to me for the first time. I can't remember what we said, maybe our names and where we came from. at the end of the conversation I invited her to dinner at my house that night. It was Christmastime, or nearly, and I made a pizza and bought a bottle of wine. We talked until very late. That was when Anne told me she'd been to Mexico several times. Overall, her adventures were very similar to mine. Anne thought this was because the lives or the youths of any two individuals would be fundamentally alike, in spite of the obvious or even glaring differences. I preferred to think that somehow she and I had both explored the same map, fought the same doomed campaigns, received a common sentimental education. At five in the morning, or perhaps later, we went to med and made love. — Roberto Bolano

It wasn't until later that I would realize that I was babbling a chant of "Ubriacha, ubrius, ubrium," to the Peanuts theme music. — Jim Butcher

For my 23rd birthday, I received a nylon string guitar. I told myself that if I could play Eric Clapton's 'Tears In Heaven,' then I could play the guitar. I practised every chance I got, driving my housemates insane, until several weeks later I had a shaky version of the song down. I wrote my first song on the guitar a few weeks after that. — Neil Jackson

I think the child I was until 12 was so much more interesting than the teenager I became. As a teenager, you get wrapped up in your friends and sexual stuff, and the imaginative life you had, it just goes. And mine was so rich and fun. Fortunately, I was able to tap back into that later on [through my books] to save my life. — Judy Blume

Aurora once told me that she knew I was different within the first few months after I was born, because as a baby, I never cried. She had no way of knowing if I was hungry or if my stomach hurt until I was old enough to point and talk. Even when I fell and it was obvious that I had hurt myself, I did not cry. When I didn't get my way, I would go off by myself and sulk or have a tantrum. But I never cried. Later, when I was eleven and Abba died, I didn't cry. When Joseph, my best friend at St. Elizabeth's, died, I didn't cry. Maybe I don't feel what others feel. I have no way of knowing. But I do feel. It's just that what I feel does not elicit tears. What I feel when others cry is more like a dry, empty aloneness, like I'm the only person left in the world.
So it is very strange to feel my eyes well with tears as I read Jasmine's list. — Francisco X Stork