Wasted Years Quotes & Sayings

It was one of those decisions that shouldn't have been so easy to get so wrong. Go on your own or take the half wasted waif. She was wearing denim hotpants with a pink vest top, and was hanging off his arm, more for stability than closeness, so he propped her up against the wall next to the counter and reached inside his coat pocket for his badge. It was definitely his badge, he clearly remembered stealing it two years before whilst in California. — Dylan Perry

He felt the rush of years, years wasted and years used wisely. He felt time moving through him, as if it were a ghost, a thing that can haunt a man's days and nights. — Cathie Pelletier

You know what, the moment I see you, first thing that comes to my mind is, I have just wasted 26 years of my life without you... — Arpit Agrawal

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. — T. S. Eliot

The two main hazards of psychoanalysis: that it might fail, and that if it succeeds, you'll never be able to forgive yourself for all those wasted years. — Mignon McLaughlin

Thanks to my effort in the last 40 years, there has been more paper and film wasted. — Man Ray

When ours are interrupted, his are not. His plans are proceeding exactly as scheduled, moving us always (including those minutes or hours or years which seem most useless or wasted or unendurable). — Elisabeth Elliot

Karen shuts the back door and turns to me. "You know I trust you, but please ... "
"Don't get pregnant," I interrupt. "I know, I know. You've been saying that every time you leave for the past two years. I'm not getting pregnant, Mom. Only terribly high and cracked out."
She laughs and hugs me. "Good girl. And wasted. Don't forget to get really wasted. — Colleen Hoover

This is where I have wasted the best years of my life. — Greta Garbo

Put the park rangers to work. Lazy scheming loafers, they've wasted too many years selling tickets at toll booths and sitting behind desks filling out charts and tables — Edward Abbey

to me. Look how many years we wasted? Don't make the same mistake we did. Tell him, and tell him soon. Or you might lose him." ********************** CHAPTER 28 ********************** Caleb was determined to tell Katie how he really felt about her - even if it meant she would reject him. — Samantha Bayarr

To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style! PLACE-NAMES: — Marcel Proust

Technology is the new religion of urban China, and no longer just in the coastal cities. Having wasted decades, centuries almost, overcoming traditional objections to progress, and then wasted thirty years convulsing to a Maoist revolutionary tune, the Chinese have finally gotten themselves into a position where they can develop technology and begin to take on the world. Everywhere you see signs that say REVIVE THE NATION THROUGH SCIENCE AND EDUCATION. — Rob Gifford

If we had known our love would come to this we could have saved our hearts the hurt of wasted years. — Blake Shelton

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now ... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph. — George Saunders

I love Death Race, it's one of my favorite films. I thought, "You know what? All that two years worth of work is now gong to be wasted because I'm highly unlikely to direct another car movie straight away," and I felt at that point there was no one who was kind of better at shooting cars, so I thought rather than let it go to waste I would explore the idea of doing commercials, and that's what I did. — Paul W. S. Anderson

It is very tough emotionally for many of us to look ourselves in the mirror and face up to the fact that we need to adjust our approach, our beliefs and our actions to get the results we desire. Our fears tell us we will have wasted all of those years and we don't want to change now. How many of you are stuck in relationships going nowhere? How many of you have stayed far too long, giving the relationship a chance? Certainly, you need to do your part to learn, change and grow. But if you can honestly tell yourself the other person is not growing with you, then wish them well, and move on. If you stay, you are disrespecting yourself. — Gary Spinell

All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don't want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow's sky. That's what I want now, and I think it's what you should want too. But it will be too late soon. We'll become too set to change. If we don't take our chance now, another may never come for either of us. — Kazuo Ishiguro

I am sorry to upset my colleagues by saying we wasted four years in opposition, but if you do get so badly defeated as a party you do have to face up to some painful facts and you do have to change. — Kenneth Clarke

I have skulked up there and wasted eight precious years of my life! The very day I was set free, I should have gone forth into the world - out into the steel-hard, dreamless world of reality! I should have begun at the bottom and swung myself up to the heights anew - higher than ever before - in spite of all that lay between. — Henrik Ibsen

Two years work wasted, I have been breeding those flies for all that time and I've got nothing out of it. — Thomas Hunt Morgan

The type of the Inevitable is death. I remember well that in my youth I believed that I was certainly exempt from its operation. First when my daughter died, next when you were wounded, I knew that I was mortal; and now I regard those years as wasted, as unproductive, in which I was not aware that my death was certain, nay, momently possible. I can now appraise at a glance those who have not yet foreseen their death. I know them for the children they are. They think that by evading its contemplation they are enhancing the savor of life. The reverse is true: only those who have grasped their non-being are capable of praising the sunlight. — Thornton Wilder

I'll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart -like something dead- lies buried.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.
You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world. — Constantine P. Cavafy

We wasted little time wondering how anyone, even Lizzie, could nurse for five years a smoldering, mounting, murderous hate for anyone as uninteresting as Abby Borden ... we did, however, attach grave importance to Lizzie's 'peculiar spells. — Victoria Lincoln

A charming eccentric, a piece of blank paper on which the electorate could write its message: You other guys are so wasted that we decided to elect this fool for two years instead. — Stephen King

A vast deal of ingenuity is wasted every year in evoking the undesirable, in the careful construction of objects which burden life. Frankenstein was a large rather than an isolated example. — Agnes Repplier

To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type! — Marcel Proust

I had a friend who trained as a lawyer, then became disenchanted and never practiced. He told me that the one benefit of those wasted years was that he no longer feared either the law or lawyers. — Julian Barnes

Some clever children don't discover how bright they are until after they've left school,' continued Mr Holcombe, 'and then spend the rest of their lives regretting the wasted years. — Jeffrey Archer

We have been the most prodigal of people with land, and for years we wasted it with impunity. There was so much of it, and no matter how we fouled it, there was always more over the next hill, or so it seemed. — William H. Whyte

All those years when Ronni thought she was sick, all those years convinced that every mole was melanoma, every cough was lung cancer, every case of heartburn was an oncoming heart attack, after all those years, when the gods finally stopped taking care of her she wasn't scared. What a pity, she thought after the doctor first diagnosed her. Then, when she refused to believe it, after the second, and the third, agreed, she thought again, what a pity I wasted all those years worrying about the worst. Somehow now that the worst was upon her, it was peaceful, calming, as if this was what she had always been waiting for. Now that it was here, it wasn't scary at all. — Jane Green

The first twenty years of my life were wasted ... I didn't fit my environment, and I didn't know any other. — Rose Wilder Lane

Years were wasted trying to make him feel better. I never stopped to see if I felt appreciated. — Darian Wilk

I lacked the advice and guidance of experienced counsellors and so wasted many years before I realised that one must not pursue several aims at the same time. — Heinrich Harrer

Staff silenced her with a hot kiss. "Hush," he whispered, taking her closer into his arms. "Mary, we have waited long enough. I want you, dearest, to make up for the lonely hours, and countless advice, and worry that your kings and cursed father would totally ruin our life together. And for the wasted years. Tonight, Mary, we are going to begin catching up-and it will take a long, long time for us to be even ... — Karen Harper

When I started having a couple of beers and loosening up, I realized how many years I had wasted going back to my hotel room alone when I could have gone and just had a beer or two. — Bradford Cox

Facebook revamped its search feature. Now you can search for any post that has ever appeared on your page. It's helpful if you want to waste time this year remembering exactly how you wasted time last year. — Conan O'Brien

Too many years fighting back tears. Why can't the past just die? Wishing you were somehow here again, knowing we must say goodbye. Try to forgive, teach me to live, give me the strength to try! No more memories, no more silent tears, no more gazing across the wasted years. Help me say goodbye. — Charles Hart

All those wasted and squandered years when I did nothing but go around looking inside myself until I ended up alone even though I was surrounded by people. But I paid attention only to what was happenstance about them - not their true selves. — Sigrid Undset

The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men. The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit. The desert was the region in which the Chosen People had wandered for forty years, cared for by God alone. They could have reached the Promised Land in a few months if they had traveled directly to it. God's plan was that they should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back on the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone. The desert was created simply to be itself, not to be transformed by men into something else. — Thomas Merton

When a creature is so badly constituted (perhaps in nature that being is man) that he cannot love unless he suffers and that he must suffer to learn truth, the life of such a being becomes in the end very exhausting. The happy years are those that are wasted; we must wait for suffering to drive us to work. — Marcel Proust

I never took a lesson until I was 20, and I'm glad I had those years living the life of a normal person. I don't consider that time wasted. — Glenn Tipton

I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.
It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and
coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself. — Sylvia Plath

I was near-delirious. Gazing up at the pillared skyline, I knew that I was surveying a tremendous work of man. Buying myself a drink in the smaller warrens below, in all their ethnic variety (and willingness to keep odd and late hours, and provide plentiful ice cubes, and free matchbooks in contrast to English parsimony in these matters), I felt the same thing in a different way. The balance between the macro and the micro, the heroic scale and the human scale, has never since ceased to fascinate and charm me. Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in that air which made one think - made me think for many years - that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it. — Christopher Hitchens

I wasn't a class clown, because my parents were very strict and because nuns in general have no sense of humor. I mean zero, zip, nada. I wasted some of my best stuff on those old hags! Look at these knuckles - those are ruler marks, and they're still visible all these years later. But I could usually get out of trouble at home if I could get my mom laughing. That's a huge ace up your sleeve as a kid. — Dan Alatorre

Goethe wrote in 1827, America, you have it better Than our old continent, You have no ruined castles And no ancient basalt. Your inner life remains untroubled By useless memory And futile strife. That was then. Now, almost two hundred years later, we've started to catch up to old Europe. We have plenty of ruined castles now, plenty of wasted strife to call our own. — Colin Dickey

Fucking hell." He smoothed her hair back with shaking fingers before turning to kiss her cheek. "All those years wasted, when I could have been loving you."
The answer was easy, obvious. "You were."
He choked on a laugh and coaxed her head back, urging her to meet his eyes. "Fine, then. All those wasted years, I could have been being loved."
"You were that, too. — Kit Rocha

College is not the only chance to learn to think, but it is the best. One thing is certain: If you haven't started by the time you finish your B.A., there's little likelihood you'll do it later. That is why an undergraduate experience devoted exclusively to career preparation is four years largely wasted. — Anonymous

Don't complain. The Israelites wasted forty years murmuring and complaining in the wilderness, when they could have just obeyed God and entered into their Promised Land. — Joyce Meyer

My hands clench at my sides. I cannot adequately express how tickled I am to know that I wasted four years pursuing a business degree at Oregon State so I could scan and file papers while my incompetent twenty-four-year-old boss supervises. — Winter Renshaw

Scientists are adding an extra second to the year 2015. Yeah. Here's the bad news. You just wasted it listening to this joke. — Conan O'Brien

He'd wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who'd only wasted a few years. — Denis Johnson

Man's dearest possession is life. It is given to him but once, and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying, he might say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world--the fight for the Liberation of Mankind — Nikolai Ostrovsky

The money has always been wasted on me. I don't care for beautiful things, funnily enough. I am my father's daughter. The things that excite me are the smell of a wood-burning stove, uncultivated fields. My house is decaying and falling to pieces. It's not had the love it deserves over twenty years. — Alison Moyet

Nazareth wasted no time in anything she did, and years of experience with her brood of nine had given her a firm way of bustling another person along that was impressive even to a professional nurse who did professional person-bustling. — Suzette Haden Elgin

Adolescence is a relatively recent thing in human history
a period of years between the constraints of childhood and the responsibilities of adulthood. This irresponsible period of adolescence is artificially extended by long years of education, much of it wasted on frivolities. Tenure extends adolescence even further for teachers and professors. — Thomas Sowell

Through our inattention, we have wasted the years that we might have used to prepare for lessened oil supplies. The next ten years are critical. — Kenneth S. Deffeyes

And people who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives ... and when the bubble has burst they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted. — Nate Saint

I prophesy in the name of the Lord God of Israel, unless the United States redress the wrongs committed upon the Saints in the state of Missouri and punish the crimes committed by her officers that in a few years the government will be utterly overthrown and wasted, and there will not be so much as a potsherd left ... — Joseph Smith Jr.

Shouldn't we suppose that many of our most painful ordeals will look quite different a million years from now, as we recall them on the New Earth? What if one day we discover that God has wasted nothing in our life on Earth? What if we see that every agony was part of giving birth to an eternal joy? — Randy Alcorn

He considered the hard times in his life. All the things he had been afraid of. All those years wasted, he told himself, because I was terrified of being different. That's why all us fifty-four-year-olds end up looking so much alike. All of us are terrified of being different. — Stuart McLean

Some people envied Ronan's money. Adam envied his time. To be as rich as Ronan was to be able to go to school and do nothing else, to have luxurious swathes of time in which to study and write papers and sleep. Adam wouldn't admit it to anyone, least of all Gansey, but he was tired. He was tired of squeezing homework in between his part-time jobs, of squeezing in sleep, squeezing in the hunt for Glendower. The jobs felt like so much wasted time: In five years, no one would care if he'd worked at a trailer factory. They'd only care if he'd graduated from Aglionby with perfect grades, or if he'd found Glendower, or if he was still alive. And Ronan didn't have to worry about any of that. — Maggie Stiefvater

He was in his fifties. He'd wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who'd wasted only a few years. — Denis Johnson

The meaning of life. The wasted years of life. The poor choices of life. God answers the mess of life with one word: 'grace.' — Max Lucado

I believe it is the responsibility of each of us to pass on whatever we have learned in our time here. If I reach enlightenment after meditating in a cave for 10 years, but do not pass on this teaching and it dies with me, this was a wasted life. I believe we are here to help one another, and each of us has a unique wisdom that we should do our best to convey to others. — Chris Matakas

Moved by their selfish desires, people seek after fame and glory. But when they have acquired it, they are already stricken in years. If you hanker after worldly fame and practise not the Way, your labors are wrongfully applied and your energy is wasted. It is like unto burning an incense stick. However much its pleasing odor be admired, the fire that consumes is steadily burning up the stick. — Gautama Buddha

Instead of giving the effort the level of attention needed, the Air Force has wasted a year doing very little to end our reliance on Russian rocket engines, if the Air Force is unwilling to do what is necessary to meet the 2019 deadline, they are going to have to figure out how to meet our space launch needs without the RD-180 (Russian engine). — John McCain

Lunch is served!" I shouted.
The brothers wasted no time. Kishan reached for the chicken, and Ren, the cookies. I smacked their hands away and handed each one a bacterial wipe.
Kishan grumbled, "Kells, I ate my food raw off the ground for three hundred years. I really don't think a little dirt's going to kill me. — Colleen Houck

Remember that no piece of honestly conducted research is ever wasted, even if it seems so at the time. Put it away in a drawer, and ten, twenty or thirty years down the road, it will come back and help you in ways you never anticipated. — Anthony James Leggett

If you look at the world the same way when you're 50 that you did when you were 20, then you wasted 30 years. — Muhammad Ali

I count no more my wasted tears;
They left no echo of their fall;
I mourn no more my lonesome years;
This blessed hour atones for all.
I fear not all that Time or Fate
May bring to burden heart or brow,-
Strong in the love that came so late,
Our souls shall keep it always now! — Elizabeth Chase Allen

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!"
"Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes. — Richard Feynman

Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion. — Anthony Marra

We wasted ten years and you're worried about a few thousand miles? Hell, we've got airplanes, we've got email, they've invented fucking cell phones. Jesus, if it comes down to it, I'll even write you a fucking letter. — Jane Harvey-Berrick

Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours wasted minutes years of repetition and time that has been killed. — Harlan Ellison

The aster has not wasted spring and summer because it has not blossomed. It has been all the time preparing for what is to follow, and in autumn it is the glory of the field, and only the frost lays it low. So there are many people who must live forty or fifty years, and have the crude sap of their natural dispositions changed and sweetened before the blossoming time can come; but their lives have not been wasted. — Henry Ward Beecher

Yes, it is easy to see that nearly six years of magical education have not been wasted on you, Potter. Ghosts are transparent. — J.K. Rowling

She carried the burn of the sun on her body. It was for all of those wasted, dull years. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life's fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust's opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe's own impeachment of Kant and Hegel . Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking. — John Carroll

I am weary seeing our laboring classes so wretchedly housed, fed, and clothed, while thousands of dollars are wasted every year over unsightly statues. If these great man must have outdoor memorials, let them be in the form of handsome blocks of buildings for the poor — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life. — Muhammad Ali

I was waiting for
something extraordinary to
happen

but as the years wasted on
nothing ever did unless I
caused it. — Charles Bukowski

No true work since the world began was ever wasted; no true life since the world began has ever failed. Oh, understand those two perverted word, failure and success and measure them by the eternal, not the earthly, standard. When after thirty obscure, toilsome, unrecorded years in the shop of the village carpenter, one came forth to be pre-eminently the man of sorrows, to wander from city to city in homeless labors, and to expire in lonely agony upon the shameful cross
was that a failure. — Frederic Farrar

I've learned one thing, and that's to quit worrying about stupid things. You have four years to be irresponsible here, relax. Work is for people with jobs. You'll never remember class time, but you'll remember the time you wasted hanging out with your friends. So stay out late. Go out with your friends on a Tuesday when you have a paper due on Wednesday. Spend money you don't have. Drink 'til sunrise. The work never ends, but college does ... — Tom Petty

If I find out that you wasted the best years of my little girl's life because of your fine-wine-aging process, I'm going to kill you. — Wesley Chu

[ ... ] no one had lived up to the roles they acted out in public. They wasted their years trying to live the lies that they had created for themselves. Only in private could they really be the demons, hypocrites and sinners they really were, and woe betide anyone who caught them at their game, because the only thing worse than a lie is a lie exposed. — Marilyn Manson

Ah, but it wasn't just her lovely face that haunted him. Nor the soft, lush body he was increasingly desperate to see liberated from that woolen cocoon. It was the way she'd so willingly owned up to the truth. The way her spirit had sparked when he'd told her to put aside her art. The way she'd practically made sweet, innocent love to him with her eyes when he'd said he cared if she lived or died.
Good Lord. The laughable irony of it. He'd wasted weeks of his adolescence memorizing sonnets, spent years perfecting little murmured innuendos. Only to learn the most seductive phrase in the English language was something akin to: All things being equal, I'd rather not see you mauled by a shark. — Tessa Dare

You have made me ashamed of the wasted years. You have made me acknowledge that no darkness has ever been deep enough to extinguish my personal knowledge of love. And all around me in this world I see evidence of love. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot. — Anne Rice

I think it killed the performance on a lot of the systems in the Labs for years because everyone had their own copy of it, but it wasn't being shared, and so they wasted huge amounts of memory back when memory was expensive. — Bill Joy

I couldn't see killing myself if I had a book that was only half-read: Fountainhead, Catcher in the Rye, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, One Hundred Years of Solitude? No. I figured that those who killed themselves first had to finish whatever book they were reading...if it were any good, that is. Of course, there's always the occasional book that makes you want to throw yourself off a bridge just for having wasted your time reading it. But I usually finished those ones, too. — Michael Anthony

Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln's Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer's rule applies: Have the courage to write badly. — Joshua Wolf Shenk

I have been studying for forty years, which is to say forty wasted years; I teach others yet am ignorant of everything; this state of affairs fills my soul with so much humiliation and disgust that my life is intolerable. I was born in Time, I live in Time, and do not know what Time is. I find myself at a point between two eternities, as our wise men say, yet I have no conception of eternity. I am composed of matter, I think, but have never been able to discover what produces thought. I do not know whether or not I think with my head the same way that I hold things with my hands. Not only is the origin of my thought unknown to me, but the origin of my movements is equally hidden: I do not know why I exist. Yet every day people ask me questions on all these issues. I must give answers, yet have nothing worth saying, so I talk a great deal, and am confused and ashamed of myself afterwards for having spoken. — Voltaire

There was a freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost made us feel that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away. — Mark Twain

I admire your courage. I know what you've given up to be here. I know the kind of artist it takes to land a role. I know that you won't receive one on your own. And I imagine you, myshka, two years from now, working at Phantom with the same aspirations, the same dreams, in the same place where you are now. It's wasted courage. And wasted love. You shouldn't have to waste those things."
I'm speechless.
And overwhelmed. When someone reaches out and gives you a hand - for no other reason than to see your success - it's powerful. And rare.
He wipes beneath my eye with his thumb. "I'd rather feed your hunger than watch you starve — Krista Ritchie

All those wasted years spent trying to get inconsequential people to like her. She never asked herself why she should like them. — Mhairi McFarlane

Looking at things is never time wasted. If your children want to stand and stare, let them. When I was marvelling at the beauty of a painting or enjoying a great view it did not occur to me that the experience, however intense, would be of value many years later. But there it has remained, tucked away in hidden bits of my mind and now it comes, shouldering aside even the most passionate love affairs. — Diana Athill

These growth hormones, where can I get a bunch of them? Is there some way that, with electricity, you could stimulate your own growth hormones? Plug yourself in for five minutes, there'd be a little jolt, but you'd get used to it. It wouldn't be bad at all; in fact, you'd get to enjoy it, probably. Then away you'd go, and youth wouldn't be wasted on the young anymore. You'd be 25, with a 95-year-old mind. Granddad would start breaking into liquor stores and staying out late. Hope we have it soon! — David Lynch

If I had one night, I'd hold you in my arms,
Find redemption, no more contention,
Keeping you close. Too long, years gone,
Wasted away. One night, our night,
Remember this. I won't forget you,
No I won't forget you. - Red-Eyed Loons — Liza M. Wiemer

The world didn't have words to measure hate. There were tons, yards, years. Volts, knots, watts. Ronan could explain how fast his car was going. He could describe exactly how warm the day was. He could specifically convey his heart rate. But there was no way for him to tell anyone else exactly how much he hated Aglionby Academy.
Any unit of measurement would have to include both the volume and the weight of the hate. And it would also have to include a component of time. The days logged in class, wasted, useless, learning skills for a life he didn't want. No single word existed, probably, to contain the concept. All, perhaps. He had all the hate for Aglionby Academy.
Thief? Aglionby was the thief. Ronan's life was the dream, pillaged. — Maggie Stiefvater

I've wasted the last five years of my life dealing in religious articles. People today find spiritual solace in ballroom dancing. — Ben Katchor