Quotes About Sunday Afternoons

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped and summer was gone.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

“Carter, who'd never seen a ghost, nonetheless found the idea of them wonderful. Who wouldn't want to see a ghost? Whenever he visited the park at night, he saw nothing. On weekend afternoons, he detoured through its rambles on his way to the ferry, watching the boaters, the Sunday painters, the wild and frantic children, and he thought how odd it was that the same joyful places, minus sunlight, became frightening.”

— Glen David Gold

“Like every experience that marks us for a lifetime, I found myself turned inside out, drawn and quartered. this was the sum of everything I'd been in my life
and more: who I am when I sing and stir-fry vegetables for my family and friends on Sunday afternoons; who I am when I wake up on freezing nights and want nothing more than to throw on a sweater, rush to my desk, and write about the person I know no one knows I am; who I am when I crave to be naked with another naked body, or when I crave to be alone in the world; who I am when every part of me seems miles and centuries apart and each swears it bears my name.”

— André Aciman

“I wonder of what you must daily endure in America, having no government to protect you, no one to tell you what to do. Is it true you're given no ration card, that you must find food for yourself? Is it true that you labor for no higher purpose than paper money? What is California, this place you come from? I have never seen a picture. What plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew, what is taught at your child-rearing collectives? Where does a woman go with her children on Sunday afternoons, and if a woman loses her husband, how does she know the government will assign her a good replacement? With whom would she curry favor to ensure her children got the best Youth Troop leader?”

— Adam Johnson

“Deciding to wait, Scott sat down with a pint away from the bar at a corner table and lit a cigarette. The clientele in there on Sunday afternoon were the same as most other afternoons. From middle-aged to old men, drinking and cursing at the world like it was the last bus which had just left the stop without them.”

— R.D. Ronald

“Yes, I was a twenty-nine year old woman who lived with her mother. One who didn't do drugs, party, or have sex. I read books, drank the occasional beer on a hot afternoon, and did the Times crossword puzzle on Sunday afternoons. I hadn't attended college, I wasn't particularly gorgeous, and I often forgot to shave my legs. On the upside, I could cook some mean dumplings and bring myself to orgasm within five minutes. Not at the same time, mind you. I wasn't that talented.”

— Alessandra Torre

“It didn't help when he told David that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldn't see her. An unseen mother couldn't go for long walks with you on summer evenings, drawing the names of trees and flowers from her seemingly infinite knowledge of nature; or help you with your homework, the familiar scent of her in your nostrils as she leaned in to correct a misspelling or puzzle over the meaning of an unfamiliar poem; or read with you on cold Sunday afternoons when the fire”

— David Nicholls

“After all, we are not responsible. We are not judges. We are not called upon to torture our fellows with thumb-screws and irons; we are not called upon to mount pulpits and lecture them on pale Sunday afternoons. It is better to look at a rose, or to read Shakespeare as I read him here in Shaftesbury Avenue.”

— Virginia Woolf

“The idle apprehend more things, are deeper than the industrious: no task limits their horizon; born into an eternal Sunday, they watch--and watch themselves watching. Sloth is a somatic skepticism, the way the flesh doubts. In a world of inaction, the idle would be the only ones not to be murderers. But they do not belong to humanity, and, sweat not being their strong point, they live without suffering the consequences of Life and of Sin. Doing neither good nor evil, they disdain-spectators of the human convulsion-the weeks of time, the efforts which asphyxiate consciousness. What would they have to fear from a limitless extension of certain afternoons except the regret of having supported a crudely elementary obviousness? Then, exasperation in the truth might induce them to imitate the others and to indulge in the degrading temptation of tasks. This is the danger which threatens sloth, that miraculous residue of paradise.”

— Emil Cioran

“Such afternoons the buses are crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade. Morningside Heights to Washington Square, Penn Station to Grant's Tomb. Parlorsnakes and flappers joggle hugging downtown uptown, hug joggling gray square after gray square, until they see the new moon giggling over Weehawken and feel the gusty wind of a dead Sunday blowing dust in their faces, dust of a typsy twilight.”

— John Dos Passos

“We stood under a roadlamp, thumbing, when suddenly cars full of young kids roared by with streamers flying. 'Yaah! Yaah! we won! we won!' they all shouted. Then they yoohooed us and got great glee out of seeing a guy and a girl on the road. Dozens of such cars passed, full of young faces and 'throaty young voices,' as the saying goes. I hated every one of them. Who did they think they were, yaahing at somebody on the road just because they were little high-school punks and their parents carved the roast beef on Sunday afternoons? Who did they think they were, making fun of a girl reduced to poor circumstances with a man who wanted to belove?”

— Jack Kerouac

“Which I would write on Sunday afternoons sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor with no pants on.”

— Mindy Kaling

“I have a lot of great racing memories growing up in Europe as a young boy - playing with car parts on my dad's desk, watching the races on Sunday afternoons to try and spot him on TV, even having the chance to go to Formula 1 races where he was working.”

— Charlie Kimball

“The best thing I can say is professional football is a business. When they are recruiting football players, they are not recruiting model citizens. Everybody has to be aware of this. What's being selected for the NFL is the ability to play and perform on Sunday afternoons. Everything else is secondary.”

— Jackson Katz

“The sport would not survive today if drivers were being killed at the rate they were in the 1960s and '70s. It would have been taken off the air. It is beamed into people's living rooms on Sunday afternoons, with children watching.”

— Damon Hill

“My two favorite things about being a pro player are Sunday afternoons being able to excite many fans and the money because I get to treat my family and friends and myself to nice things.”

— Dante Hall

“My biggest ambition when I was younger was to appear on stage at what was then Nimrod, which is the theatre where my father used to take me on Sunday afternoons to see matinees. The most extraordinary things used to occur on that stage.”

— David Wenham

“Sunday afternoons at a parish center - or a community center - is familiar territory for me.”

— Denis McDonough

“This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.”

— Margaret Atwood

“Sweet Sunday afternoons, beneath the chestnut-tree in our Combray garden, from which I was careful to eliminate every commonplace incident of my actual life, replacing them by a career of strange adventures and ambitions in a land watered by living streams, you still recall those adventures and ambitions to my mind when I think of you, and you embody and preserve them by virtue of having little by little drawn round and enclosed them (which I went on with my book and the heat of the day declined) in the gradual crystallization, slowly altering in form and dappled with a pattern of chestnut-leaves, of your silent, sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours.”

— Marcel Proust

“In the plenitude of their relationship, Florentina Ariza asked himself which of the two was love: the turbulent bed or the peaceful Sunday afternoons, and Sara Noriega calmed him with the simple argument that love was everything they did naked. She said, 'Spiritual love from the waist up and physical love from the waist down.”

— Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez

“When I still lived in Manhattan, people-watching was my hobby, and I spent many Sunday afternoons eating up the scene from a window seat at a Starbucks on Broadway.”

— Susan Orlean

“On game day, until five o'clock or so, the white desert light held off the essential Sunday gloom-autumn sinking into winter, loneliness of October dusk with school the next day-but there was always a long still moment toward the end of those football afternoons where the mood of the crowd turned and everything grew desolate and uncertain, onscreen and off, the sheet-metal glare off the patio glass fading to gold and then gray, long shadows and night falling into desert stillness, a sadness I couldn't shake off, a sense of silent people filing toward the stadium exits and cold rain falling in college towns back east.”

— Donna Tartt

“Broiling Sunday afternoons in what I still call Joe Robbie Stadium.”

— Paul Levine

“During terms, Professor Marsden lives in Cambridge with his wife, chess player
extraordinaire and distinguished physician and surgeon Bryony Asquith Marsden. His
favorite time of day is half past six in the evening, when he meets Mrs. Marsden's train at the
station, as the latter returns from her day in London. On Sunday afternoons, rain or shine,
Professor and Mrs. Marsden take a walk along The Backs, and treasure growing old
together.”

— Sherry Thomas

“Everyone had forgotten her. But that's the way Penny was
so quiet and unimportant that you could look right at her and never see her. Esther had no idea why Penny always showed up at Grandma's house on Sunday afternoons when they came to visit. She was just one of those nosy neighbors with no life of her own, who watched other people's lives as if watching a movie.”

— Lynn Austin

“In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.”

— Douglas Adams

“It's basically the same, just darker. (on racing Saturday nights as opposed to Sunday afternoons, 1991”

— Alan Kulwicki

“Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.”

— Dylan Thomas

“I suppose everybody has a mental picture of the days of the week, some seeing them as a circle, some as an endless line, and others again, for all I know, as triangles and cubes. Mine is a wavy line proceeding to infinity, dipping to Wednesday which is the colour of old silver dark with polishing and rising again to a pale gold Sunday. This day has a feeling in my picture of warmth and light breezes and sunshine and afternoons that stretch to infinity and mornings full of far-off bells.”

— Angela Thirkell

“The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.”

— Alan Bennett

“Nature, like Miamonides said, is mainly a good place to throw beer cans on Sunday afternoons.”

— Edward Abbey

“Sunday afternoons are the longest afternoons of all ...”

— Carson McCullers