1. If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he make it now. Then I will either wait for him or forget him.
2. It’s hard being left behind. (…) It’s hard to be the one who stays.
3. If I die, I will wait for you, do you understand? No matter how long. I will watch from beyond to make sure you live every year you have to its fullest, and then we’ll have so much to talk about when I see you again… (Bones)
4. Patience is power.
Patience is not an absence of action;
rather it is “timing”
it waits on the right time to act,
for the right principles
and in the right way.
5. For a while” is a phrase whose length can’t be measured.At least by the person who’s waiting.
6. I’ve learned that waiting is the most difficult bit, and I want to get used to the feeling, knowing that you’re with me, even when you’re not by my side.
7. I have always, essentially, been waiting. Waiting to become something else, waiting to be that person I always thought I was on the verge of becoming, waiting for that life I thought I would have. In my head, I was always one step away. In high school, I was biding my time until I could become the college version of myself, the one my mind could see so clearly. In college, the post-college “adult” person was always looming in front of me, smarter, stronger, more organized. Then the married person, then the person I’d become when we have kids. For twenty years, literally, I have waited to become the thin version of myself, because that’s when life will really begin.
And through all that waiting, here I am. My life is passing, day by day, and I am waiting for it to start. I am waiting for that time, that person, that event when my life will finally begin.
I love movies about “The Big Moment” – the game or the performance or the wedding day or the record deal, the stories that split time with that key event, and everything is reframed, before it and after it, because it has changed everything. I have always wanted this movie-worthy event, something that will change everything and grab me out of this waiting game into the whirlwind in front of me. I cry and cry at these movies, because I am still waiting for my own big moment. I had visions of life as an adventure, a thing to be celebrated and experienced, but all I was doing was going to work and coming home, and that wasn’t what it looked like in the movies.
John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” For me, life is what was happening while I was busy waiting for my big moment. I was ready for it and believed that the rest of my life would fade into the background, and that my big moment would carry me through life like a lifeboat.
The Big Moment, unfortunately, is an urban myth. Some people have them, in a sense, when they win the Heisman or become the next American Idol. But even that football player or that singer is living a life made up of more than that one moment. Life is a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous, glowing pearl. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments are so small, and so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies.
But this is what I’m finding, in glimpses and flashes: this is it. This is it, in the best possible way. That thing I’m waiting for, that adventure, that move-score-worthy experience unfolding gracefully. This is it. Normal, daily life ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, in our houses and apartments, in our beds and at our dinner tables, in our dreams and prayers and fights and secrets – this pedestrian life is the most precious thing any of use will ever experience.
8. There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison
9. Waiting hurts. Forgetting hurts. But not knowing which decision to take can sometimes be the most painful.
10. When I was little and running on the race track at school, I always stopped and waited for all the other kids so we could run together even though I knew (and everybody else knew) that I could run much faster than all of them! I pretended to read slowly so I could “wait” for everyone else who couldn’t read as fast as I could! When my friends were short I pretended that I was short too and if my friend was sad I pretended to be unhappy. I could go on and on about all the ways I have limited myself, my whole life, by “waiting” for people. And the only thing that I’ve ever received in return is people thinking that they are faster than me, people thinking that they can make me feel bad about myself just because I let them and people thinking that I have to do whatever they say I should do. My mother used to teach me “Cinderella is a perfect example to be” but I have learned that Cinderella can go fuck herself, I’m not waiting for anybody, anymore! I’m going to run as fast as I can, fly as high as I can, I am going to soar and if you want you can come with me! But I’m not waiting for you anymore.
11. As long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn’t happened.
12. Then I thought, boy, isn’t that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.
13. For a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a “Reserved” sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact that I was sure I’d never see her again.
14. Are you ready?” Klaus asked finally.
“No,” Sunny answered.
“Me neither,” Violet said, “but if we wait until we’re ready we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives, Let’s go.
15. After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.
16. I want to reach out and grab his hand and hold it to me, right over my heart, right where it aches the most. I don’t know if doing that would heal me or make my heart break entirely, but either way this constant hungry waiting would be over.
17. It is very strange that the years teach us patience – that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.
18. Waiting for you is like waiting for rain in this drought. Useless and disappointing.” ~ Sam (Hilary Duff), A Cinderella Story
19. Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it.
20. Wait. This was the first lesson I had learned about love. The day drags along, you make thousands of plans, you imagine every possible conversation, you promise to change your behavior in certain ways — and you feel more and more anxious until your loved one arrives. But by then, you don’t know what to say. The hours of waiting have been transformed into tension, the tension has become fear, and the fear makes you embarrassed about showing affection.
21. Knowing someone isn’t coming back
doesn’t mean you ever stop waiting
22. The wait is long, my dream of you does not end.
23. I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting.
24. I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.
25. Is that why you’ve been pushing me away? Because of how you look? […] I waited for you my whole life. Yearned for you my whole life. After Tersa told me you were coming, I spent seven hundred years searching for you[….] I never gave a damn what you looked like–tall, short, fat, thin, plain, beautiful, ugly. Why would I care about what you looked like? The flesh was the shell that housed the glory[….] Even if I couldn’t be your physical lover, there are other ways to be a lover and I know them all. So don’t stand there and tell me how you feel depends on how you look!
26. Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience – waiting, and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking.
27. I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able to honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray: Thy will be done.
28. I’ll come back to you,” I say. “I promise you, if it’s the last thing I do, I’ll come back to you.”
Her face is buried in my neck. She nods.
“I’ll count the minutes until you do.” she says.
29. Sitting and waiting is one of the most miserable occupations known to man – not that it usually is known to men; women do it much more often.
30. Everybody is waiting for cooler weather–and I am just waiting for you–. (Bob Dylan in a letter)
31. Wait on the Lord” is a constant refrain in the Psalms, and it is a necessary word, for God often keeps us waiting. He is not in such a hurry as we are, and it is not his way to give more light on the future than we need for action in the present, or to guide us more than one step at a time. When in doubt, do nothing, but continue to wait on God. When action is needed, light will come.
32. Never give up on someone. Sometimes the answers you are looking for are the same answers another person is looking for. Two people searching together are always better than one person alone.
33. Often a Christian man or woman falls prey to that cruel and vexatious spirit, wondering how to find marriage, who, when, where? It is on God that we should wait, as a waiter waits–not for but on the customer–alert, watchful, attentive, with no agenda of his own, ready to do whatever is wanted. ‘My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.’ (Ps. 62:5 KJV) In Him alone lie our security, our confidence, our trust. A spirit of restlessness and resistance can never wait, but one who believes he is loved with an everlasting love, and knows that underneath are the everlasting arms, will find strength and peace.
34. Fear is the glue that keeps you stuck. Faith is the solvent that sets you free.
35. I do know that waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts. Its easy to talk oneself into a decision that has no permanence – easier sometimes than to wait patiently.
36. Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.
37. Even a snail will eventually reach its destination.
38. I think that love is stronger than habits or circumstances. I think it is possible to keep yourself for someone for a long time, and still remember why you were waiting when she comes at last…. I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me.
39. The common man prays, ‘I want a cookie right now!’ And God responds, ‘If you’d listen to what I say, tomorrow it will bring you 100 cookies.
40. When you chose to follow the way of purity, did you expect it to be easy? When you decided to wait for the best, did you think that waiting would be fun? Did you think that your faith would not be tested? When you decided to take the narrow path, did no one warn you that difficulties, hardship, and tears would be part of the journey, and that you would often face rejection from others and be forced to walk alone? My daughter, that which you wait for the longest you treasure the most, and through much struggle the prize is won.
41. He tried to tell me week after week to accept things as they were and move on with my life. But if there was one man who had put his life on hold to wait for something or someone, it was him.
42. The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn’t ring. Or the phone.
43. I’m hungry for a juicy life. I lean out my window at night and I can taste it out there, just waiting for me.
44. Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if
he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast.
45. What we are waiting for is not as important as what happens to us while we are waiting. Trust the process.
46. It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this “once in a thousand years” has come today.
47. There was nothing new in sitting on this dock, on this or that wooden bench, watching for his boat to come. In some ways, she was always waiting for him.
48. Tides do what tides do–they turn.
49. He has served countless kings, faked countless deaths, bided his time, waiting for you.
50. Time was a funny and fickle thing. Sometimes there was never enough of it, and other times it stretched out endlessly.
51. If chess has any relationship to film-making, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.
52. The street to my left was backed up with traffic and I watched the people waiting patiently in the cars. There was almost always a man and a women, staring straight ahead, not talking. It was, finally, for everyone, a matter of waiting. You waited and you waited- for the hospital, the doctor, the plumber, the madhouse, the jail, papa death himself. First the signal red, then the signal was green. The citizens of the world ate food and watched t.v. and worried about their jobs or lack of the same, while they waited.
53. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, only distance can lessen the sting of them.
54. Time felt slower when we do nothing but wait.
55. The most inefficient and self-harming thing a person can do is go out looking for love. Let it find you when the time is right and you’re out doing what you love to do. Only then will you find it in its truest form.
56. Do you think we’ll be waiting long?” Valkyrie asked,
keeping her voice low.
“The last time we were in this building, we accused the
Grand Mage of being a traitor,” Skulduggery said. “Yes, I think
we’ll be waiting long.
57. I want no blood from you–not until we’re both sweaty and naked and you’re screaming my name.
58. Waiting turns men into bears in a barn, and women into cats in a sack.
59. He thought of the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she had contentedly pursued her own lone quite path-for him.
60. Trust is not a gasoline-soaked blanket that succumbs to the matches of betrayal, never able to be used for its warmth again; it’s a tapestry that wears thin in places, but can be patched over if you have the right materials, circumstances, and patience to repair it. If you don’t, you’re always the one who feels the coldest when winter comes.
