Wandering Here And There Quotes & Sayings

This is ridiculous, she thought. I'm possessed of terrifying powers. Why am I relying on a ridiculous little gun that I picked because I thought it was cute? I don't need this thing. She threw it contemptuously over her shoulder. Damn right! I took out a house of weird fungal cultists that had devoured three teams of supernatural SWAT teams. I am a badass. She paused and expanded her senses outward, searching for any kind of life. Okay, nothing. At least, she thought uneasily, nothing that I can detect. But then why does it smell so bad down here? There's something foul wandering the underground tunnels beneath my — Daniel O'Malley

Well, it was really very pleasant to see how things lazily adapted themselves to purposes. Here was this Mr Gridley, a man of a robust will, and surprising energy - intellectually speaking, a sort of inharmonious blacksmith* - and he could easily imagine that there Gridley was, years ago, wandering about in life for something to expend his superfluous combativeness upon - a sort of Young Love among the thorns - when the Court of Chancery came in his way, and accommodated him with the exact thing he wanted. There they were, matched, ever afterwards! Otherwise he might have been a great general, blowing up all sorts of towns, or he might have been a great politician, dealing in all sorts of parliamentary rhetoric; but, as it was, he and the Court of Chancery had fallen upon each other in the pleasantest way, and nobody was much the worse, and Gridley was, so to speak, from that hour provided for. — Charles Dickens

I spent a long time in the study of the abstract sciences, and was disheartened by the small number of fellow-students in them. When I commenced the study of man, I saw that these abstract sciences are not suited to man, and that I was wandering further from my own state in examining them, than others in not knowing them. I pardoned their little knowledge; but I thought at least to find many companions in the study of man, and that it was the true study which is suited to him. I have been deceived; still fewer study it than geometry. It is only from want of knowing how to study this that we seek the other studies. But is it not that even here is not the knowledge which man should have, and that for the purposes of happiness it is better for him not to know himself? — Pascal

Here's a story, and you don't have to visit many
houses to find it. One person is talking,
the other one is not really listening.
Someone can look like they are but they're
actually thinking about something they
want to say, or their minds are just
wandering. Or they're looking at that
little box people hold in their hands these
days. And people get discouraged, so they
quit trying. And the very quiet people,
you may have noticed, are often the sad
people. — Mary Oliver

A man could spend his whole life wandering about here and never find himself, especially if he is born lost. — Jose Saramago

Must've been off my head, wandering around the harbour so long. Didn't even get the nightgowns. Are the kids okay? Damn, I wish I didn't always have to be home at the right time. At the Day of Judgement, God will say Stacy MacAindra, what have you done with your life? And I'll say, Well, let's see, Sir, I think I loved my kids. And He'll say, Are you certain of that? And I'll say, God, I'm not certain about anything any more. So He'll say, To hell with you, then. We're all positive thinkers up here. Then again, maybe He wouldn't. Maybe He'd say, Don't worry, Stacy, I'm not all that certain, either. Sometimes I wonder if I even exist. And I'd say, I know what you mean, Lord. I have the same trouble with myself. — Margaret Laurence

We were all born by accident but this wandering caravan
will make camp in perfection
Forget the nonsense categories of there and here, race, nation, religion, starting point and destination
You are soul, and you are love, ...
No more questions now as to what it is we're doing here — Coleman Barks

So what? You act all mysterious to seem more interesting?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You're always wandering off or running away," he said. "But you're a lot more
interesting when you're just being yourself you know. When you're actually here."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Emma said coldly. "Where else would I be?"

"You know what I mean," he said, a rough edge to his voice. "It's like you're so busy trying not to act like your family that you've never even stopped to consider that it might not be such a bad thing."

"Well what about you?" she shot back, aware of the bitterness in her words.
"You complain about your dad not wanting you around, and then you complain when he wants you to stay home for school. You can't have it both wars."

"Well neither can you," he said. " You can't keep everyone at arms length and then expect them to be there for you when you need them. — Jennifer E. Smith

Having your evening coffee over
A field guide of trails or alpine blossoms

& so I need now to ask you
Which of the old journals did you first

Open to a map of my long wandering
When did you first know I'd come back

& how did you find yourself here
& how did you know this single lantern

You are reading by was the last possible
Light to lead me home? — David St. John

Now mind is clear
as a cloudless sky.
Time then to make a
home in wilderness.

What have I done but
wander with my eyes
in the trees? So I
will build: wife,
family, and seek
for neighbors.

Or I
perish of lonesomeness
or want of food or
lightning or the bear
(must tame the hart
and wear the bear).

And maybe make an image
of my wandering, a little
image - shrine by the
roadside to signify
to traveler that I live
here in the wilderness
awake and at home. — Allen Ginsberg

Speak you too,
speak as the last,
say out your say.

Speak-
But don't split off No from Yes.
Give your say this meaning too:
Give it the shadow.

Give it shadow enough,
Give it as much
As you know is spread round you from
Midnight to midday and midnight.

Look around:
See how things all come alive-
By death! Alive!
Speaks true who speaks shadow.

But now the place shrinks, where you stand:
Where now, shadow-stripped, where?
Climb. Grope upwards.
Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer!
Finer: a thread
The star wants to descend on:
So as to swim down beliow, down here
Where it sees itself shimmer:in the swell
Of wandering words. — Paul Celan

The first thing you notice, coming to Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest. The difference is so profound that you're left wondering when the mutation in Semitic blood occurred, as though God parted the Red Sea and said: Okay, you rude ones, keep wandering toward the Promised Land. The rest of you can stay here and rot in the desert, saying 'welcome, most welcome' and drowning each other in tea until the end of time. — Tony Horwitz

The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather-beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins. — Heinrich Heine

when a daoist has finished his cultivation, he will be a roaming deity or a wandering immortal. there are mountains and waters in the heavens just as here, and he will stay on one such mountain — Li Hongzhi

Most of us in our thinking are wandering from this to that to the other thing, and are constantly distracted. And Zen is the opposite of that. It's being completely here, fully in the present. And you know when you're completely concentrated, you're not really aware of your own existence. It's rather the same as the sense of sight. If you see your eyes, that is to say if you see spots in front of your eyes, or something on the lens of the eye, then you're not seeing properly. To the degree to which you're seeing properly, you're unaware of your eyes. In the same way, if your clothes fit well, you're unaware of them on your body. And if you're completely concentrated on what you're doing, you're unaware of yourself. — Alan W. Watts

O lovely river of Yvette!
O darling river! like a bride,
Some dimpled, bashful, fair Lisette
Thou goest to wed the Orge's tide.
O lovely river Yvette!
O darling stream! on balanced wings
The wood-birds sang the chansonnette
That here a wandering poet sings. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

So, here we are, all of us poor bewildered darlings, wandering adrift in a universe too big and too complex for us, clasping and ricochetting off other people too different and too perplexing for us, and seeking to satisfy myriad, shifting, vague needs and desires, both mean and exalted. And sometimes we mesh. Don't we?
- Attributed to James Flynn, Ph.D. — Carl R. Rogers

When I started to draw, most of my influences were from other painters and illustrators, so I was drawing landscape at second hand, really. The trees were Rackham trees, or trees that I had seen in paintings rather than from my own observation ... and I started to feel this was a real lack in my work. Everything was too generalised, and not based on real experience. Then in 1975, after having worked for some years in London as a book cover illustrator mainly, I came down to Devon and stayed with some friends up on the moor. In the course of this one weekend, wandering around the moor, finding rivers and ancient woods, I realised that everything that I would ever want to draw was actually here. There was so much richness in the texture and forms of these fantastic trees ... and I decided in the course of that weekend to come and live here. I looked at a couple of houses, found one, and made an offer on it, all in that one weekend! — Alan Lee

I've been wandering around all night - I couldn't sleep - and I kept finding myself walking here. To you. — Cassandra Clare

I have been told, that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personalrelations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ballimore! Ballimore, where's the inkwell?' Dobbilan's voice echoed down the corridor, interrupting Cimorene in mid-sentence. 'Where are you? Why can't I find anything around here when I want it?'
'Because you never look in the right place, dear,' Ballimore called. 'The inkwell is in the kitchen next to the grocery list, where it's been for the past six months, and I'm in the dining room. Which is where you'd be if you'd done what I asked you to, instead of wandering off in all directions. — Patricia C. Wrede

Here I am, just wandering down a deserted street in the middle of the night. I hope I don't run into any trouble. Goodness, that would just ruin my whole evening. I strolled and hummed, trying to project Innocent Victim. — MaryJanice Davidson

It is imperative that the past of the pilgrims' progress be intentionally carried forward into the present as we work into our future. Without it we cannot know who we are, why we are here, or where we can go. Without a common past to live out of we become aimless and wandering individuals instead of a pilgrim people. — H. Richard Niebuhr

here i am. there i was, broken. broken heart, broken dreams, broken soul. and there i was, stumbling down an endless road, my face tattooed in ashes, stained with tears, my clothes tattered, my feet tired of wandering. and there You were. standing at the end of the road, with your heart and arms open wide, and my tired feet ran, they ran to You, to your arms, to your heart. and here i am. slowly being put back together. here i am, no longer in tatters, but clothed in mercy, wrapped in grace. here i am, with a heart with open doors, a soul free to love and free to dream and free to be. with a crown of wildflowers instead of a crown of thorns, and a face of light and beauty instead of ashes. here i am. — Gaby Compres

Let me say right here, if I haven't made it clear, that I have seen as many pale, naked old-man parts in the last twenty-four hours to bruise my delicate psyche for a lifetime, so don't be surprised if you someday find me wandering the moors at midnight, a crazed look in my eye, babbling about albino Tater Tots nesting in Brillo pads and being pursued by sagging man ass, because that shit can happen when you've been traumatized. — Christopher Moore

Come from your wandering way, weary travelers. Come to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Come to that heavenly haven called home. Here you will discover the truth. Here you will learn the reality of the Godhead, the comfort of the plan of salvation, the sanctity of the marriage covenant, the power of personal prayer. Come home. — Thomas S. Monson

I sit and ponder my existence: how I'm here, what put me here in these thoughts, these feelings, birthed from a timeless sleep, what it felt like, or rather the lack thereof, to not have been and now to 'be', and suddenly, I realize how absurd I am to exist, the fragility in my understanding of existence; I then wonder why the supernatural, the thought of other beings, of God or of gods, must be distinctly absurd - by which I am no longer sure. 'If I exist and I have made myself absurd to me, then why not they exist while merely believed absurd by me?' Perhaps it is true that in a wandering head, one full of wonders, the natural becomes supernatural and the supernatural becomes preternatural (or rational within the sights of discovery and explanation), just as the return home after a life-long journey feels, for a moment, foreign after the many experiences. — Criss Jami

When we enter a forest phase in our lives we enter a period of wandering and a time of potential soul growth. Here it is possible to find what we have cut off from, to "remember" a once vital aspect of ourselves. We may uncover a wellspring of creativity that has been hidden for decades. — Jean Shinoda Bolen

I should see the garden far better," said Alice to herself, "if I could get to the top of that hill: and here's a path that leads straight to it - at least, no it doesn't do that - " (after going a few yards along the path, and turning several sharp corners), "but I suppose it will at last. But how curiously it twists! It's more like a corkscrew than a path! Well, this turn goes to the hill, I suppose - no, it doesn't! This goes straight back to the house! Well then, I'll try it the other way." And so she did: wandering up and down, and trying turn after turn, but always coming back to the house, do what she would. Indeed, once, when she turned a corner rather more quickly than usual, she ran against it before she could stop herself. — Lewis Carroll

My wandering has led me to the beginning of our journey together. I suppose it's only fitting for me to be here at that journey's end. — Marie Lu

In a few moments he came into the core of himself, where he was alone, and felt strangely companioned, not by anyone or anything, but by himself. The rejected self found refuge here, not a cowed refuge, but somehow a wandering ease; as if it were indestructible, and had its own final pride, its own secret eyes. — Neil M. Gunn

You've been here before, Bell. Remember the stories you told me about wandering in the woods when you were a little girl? It scared the crap out of you, but you went out there all alone, knee-high to a bunny rabbit, and picked berries and climbed trees and found bird nests and came home all bug-bitten and mossy. And you loved every minute of it. It made you our beautiful Arctic Bell, impervious to cold and feared by mosquitoes. Aren't you glad you didn't stay by grandma's side, darning socks and baking gingerbread?
Who darns socks?
Girls nobody tells stories about. — Alexis M. Smith

They were here today because Aaron was very weak and dying, and was about to be gathered to his fathers. Moses was not much younger than Aaron, one hundred and twenty years old, but was much stronger for his age. The high priesthood had to be transferred onto Eleazer. This was the fortieth year of their wandering, and Yahweh had promised that Aaron would not enter the Promised Land. Moses knew his own time would be soon as well, but he did not know when. Aaron had worn the vestments of his high priesthood for the sake of the ceremony they were now performing before the eyes of all of Israel below them. — Brian Godawa

Each remembered thing in the room was disenchanted, was deadened as an unlit transparency, till her wandering gaze came to the group of miniatures, and there at last she saw something which had gathered new breath and meaning: it was the miniature of Mr. Casaubon's aunt Julia, who had made the unfortunate marriage - of Will Ladislaw's grandmother. Dorothea could fancy that it was alive now - the delicate woman's face which yet had a headstrong look, a peculiarity difficult to interpret. Was it only her friends who thought her marriage unfortunate? or did she herself find it out to be a mistake, and taste the salt bitterness of her tears in the merciful silence of the night? What breadths of experience Dorothea seemed to have passed over since she first looked at this miniature! She felt a new companionship with it, as if it had an ear for her and could see how she was looking at it. Here was a woman who had known some difficulty about marriage. — George Eliot

What could be more absurd? Yet it is nature's folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? — Virginia Woolf

That's plain enough, isn't it? You're no longer wandering exiles. This kingdom of faith is now your home country. You're no longer strangers or outsiders. You belong here, with as much right to the name Christian as anyone. God is building a home. He's using us all - irrespective of how we got here - in what he is building. He used the apostles and prophets for the foundation. Now he's using you, fitting you in brick by brick, stone by stone, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone that holds all the parts together. We see it taking shape day after day - a holy temple built by God, all of us built into it, a temple in which God is quite at home. — Eugene H. Peterson

The space center's proximity to my backyard came to signify an intersection between heaven and hell. Florida was somewhere between the two; it was America's phantom limb, a place where spaceships were catapulted out into the cosmos. Alligators emerged from brackish water. Vultures and hawks circled above. Mosquitoes patrolled the atmosphere at eye level. We shared an ocean with sharks and dolphins. There were no seasons, only variations of humidity. Time slithered, festering in a damp wake of recollections.

I believed in the Bermuda Triangle. I thought it would move in over Florida one night. By dusk an unknown force would vaporize us through a tear in the atmosphere. We'd be stuck, wandering in a parallel version of the same place, unaware that we were dead but dreaming.

People came here to vanish. — Paul Kwiatkowski

She couldn't quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun," partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved shore, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I'd felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother's death - Kate had gotten married, I'd finally published another book and gone on tour with it - some sort of internal-pause button had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I'd specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we'd barely spoken of her. — Richard Russo

These evil freaks," Karrin said. "They always pick the most charming places to hang out."
"Dark energy here," I said. "Keeps people from wandering in and randomly interfering. And it feels homey."
"I know you haven't burned down any buildings in a while," she said, "but if you start feeling the need ... — Jim Butcher

Gardening is a long road, with many detours and way stations, and here we all are at one point or another. It's not a question of superior or inferior taste, merely a question of which detour we are on at the moment. Getting there (as they say) is not important; the wandering about in the wilderness or in the olive groves or in the bayous is the whole point. — Henry Mitchell

Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable. — Milan Kundera

For the first day of your trip to Istanbul, you will be wandering around Sultanahmet, the historical peninsula and the old city of Istanbul. Here, you get to feast your eyes on a breathtaking collection of architectural marvels, such as the Hippodrome, Topkapi Palace, Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia. — 3 Day City Guides

QUINCE
Francis Flute, the bellows-mender.
FLUTE
Here, Peter Quince.
QUINCE
Flute, you must take Thisby on you.
FLUTE
What is Thisby? a wandering knight?
QUINCE
It is the lady that Pyramus must love.
FLUTE
Nay, faith, let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming. — William Shakespeare

Eternity.-Thy name Or glad, or fearful, we pronounce, as thoughts Wandering in darkness shape thee. Thou strange being, Which art and must be, yet which contradict'st All sense, all reasoning,-thou, who never wast Less than thyself, and who still art thyself Entire, though the deep draught which Time has taken Equals thy present store-No line can reach To thy unfathomed depths. The reasoning sage Who can dissect a sunbeam, count the stars, And measure distant worlds, is here a child, And, humbled, drops his calculating pen. — Anna Letitia Barbauld

What if it's the there
and not the here
that I long for?
The wander
and not the wait,
the magic
in the lost feet
stumbling down
the faraway street
and the way the moon
never hangs
quite the same. — Tyler Knott Gregson

Meditation here is not reflection or any other kind of discursive thinking. It is pure concentration: training the mind to dwell on an interior focus without wandering, until it becomes absorbed in the object of its contemplation. But absorption does not mean unconsciousness. The outside world may be forgotten, but meditation is a state of intense inner wakefulness. — Anonymous

The great maritime city of Asiatic Ionia, was of old the meeting-place of the East and the West. Here the Phoenician trader from the Baltic would meet the Hindu wandering to Intra, from Extra, Gangem; and the Hyperborean would step on shore side by side with the Nubian and the Aethiop. — Anonymous

If anyone should talk to her," Renfield piped up, "it should be me. We're the most compatible, culturewise. I'm sure that on top of feeling as if she's been thrust into one of the many levels of Hades, with all of its attendant demons, she feels like a lady wandering, lost, amongst the mannerless cads of the slums."
We were all silent for a moment before Tom asked, "You do realize that we're sitting right here, right?"
"Oh, I am horribly aware of this fact."
"Just checking. — Lia Habel

In the intricate paths of life when difficulties and hardships confront a man, and the darkness of difficulty and suffering becomes long, it is patience only that acts like a light for a Muslim, that keeps him safe from wandering here and there, and saves him from the muddy marsh of disappointment, desperation and frustration. — Al-Ghazali

Lovers think they are looking for each other, but there is only one search: wandering This world is wandering that, both inside one transparent sky. In here there is no dogma and no heresy. — Rumi

Why then are we here? Would God keep His children out of paradise a single moment longer than was necessary? Why is the army of the living God still on the battlefield when one charge might give them the victory? Why are His children still wandering hither and thither through a maze, when a solitary word from His lips would bring them into the centre of their hopes in heaven? The answer is - they are here that they may "live unto the Lord," and may bring others to know His love. We remain on earth as sowers to scatter good seed; as ploughmen to break up the fallow ground; as heralds publishing salvation. We are here as the "salt of the earth," to be a blessing to the world. - Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening — Larissa Murphy

Old bureaucrat, my companion here present, no man ever opened an escape route for you, and you are not to blame. You built peace for yourself by blocking up every chink of light, as termites do. You rolled yourself into your ball of bourgeois security, your routines, the stifling rituals of your provincial existence, you built your humble rampart against winds and tides and stars. You have no wish to ponder great questions, you had enough trouble suppressing awareness of your human condition. You do not dwell on a wandering planet, you ask yourself no unanswerable questions — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

You have a very peculiar expression on your face,' he commented drowsily.
'I was just thinking.'
'About what?'
'About how we know what's real. How we wake out of a timeless place and recognize time. How you know me here, now, even when nothing or anyone else in this place is familiar. I might have been wandering through your dream, but you knew immediately which of me will bring you paper.'
He was silent for so long, still clasping her wrist, that she thought he must have fallen asleep without knowing it. He said finally, 'Say that again.'
'I can't,' she answered helplessly. 'It was just a thought. I gave it to you.'
'Something about dreams coming to life--'
'That's not what I said. — Patricia A. McKillip

Dim as the borrowed beams of moons and stars
To lonely, weary, wandering travelers,
Is Reason to the soul; and, as on high
Those rolling fires discover but the sky,
Not light us here, so Reason's glimmering ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day. — John Dryden

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

to grace how great a debtor Daily I'm constrained to be! Let thy goodness, like a fetter, Bind my wandering heart to thee. Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, Prone to leave the God I love; Here's my heart, O take and seal it, Seal it for thy courts above. — Robert Robinson