Quotes About Wandering Eyes

“I know that to you everything has changed for the worse over the last weeks. But for me ... " Elias pauses. rests his forehead into the curve of my neck. "Before you my life was nothing but wandering and solitude and death. Now with you there's possibility." He pulls back until we're looking into each other's eyes. "I'm falling inn love with you, Gabrielle. Not with the person you used to be, but you.”

— Carrie Ryan

“Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”

— Italo Calvino

“What had he said to them? "I bow my knees before the country, before the masses, before the whole people ... " And what then? What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been driven through the desert, with threats and promises, with imaginary terrors and imaginary rewards. But where was the Promised Land? Did there really exist any such goal for this wandering mankind? That was a question to which he would have liked an answer before it was too late. Moses had not been allowed to enter the land of promise either, But he had been allowed to see it, from the top of the mountain, spread at his feet. Thus, it was easy to die, with the visible certainty of one's goal before one's eyes. He, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, had not been taken to the top of a mountain; and wherever his eye looked, he saw nothing but desert and the darkness of night.”

— Arthur Koestler

“My woman has a wandering eye;
Yarrow, thyme and thorn.
She eyes the ocean and the sky
While stitching sails, forlorn.
I got a kiss, and then a tear
As she bade me go;
But on the waves, my heart's in fear:
My woman's in the know.”

— F.T. McKinstry

“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

“Yesterday, I was collecting words.
One was up there, sitting in the bo tree,
Another was in the banyan.
One was wandering in my street,
Another was lying in the earthen jar.
A green word lay in the fields,
A black one was eating flesh.
A blue word was flying
With a grain of the sun in its beak.
Every single thing in this world looks like a word to me.
The words of eyes,
The words of hands.
But I do not understand words I hear from a mouth.
I can only read words.
I can only read words.”

— Shiv Kumar Batalvi

“If I am ever to find these trees meaningful
I must have you by the hand. As it is, they
stretch dusty fingers into an obscure sky,
and the snow looks up like a face dirtied
with tears. Should I cry out and see what happens?
There could only be a stranger wandering
in this landscape, cold, unfortunate, himself
frozen fast in wintry eyes.”

— Frank O'Hara

“Anthony grinned at her, knowing that would probably infuriate her all the more. My eyes have been a-wandering, as you put it, for the last nineteen years. Give them a rest, Roslynn. They settled on you and don't want to move on.”

— Johanna Lindsey

“My darling was purring in her sleep, with the archaic smile on her lips, and she had the extra glow of comfort and solace she gets after love, a calm fulfilledness.
I should have been sleepy after wandering around the night before, but I wasn't. I've noticed that I am rarely sleepy if I know I can sleep long in the morning. The red dots were swimming in my eyes, and the street light threw the shadows of naked elm branches on the ceiling, where they made slow and stately cats' cradles because the spring wind was blowing. The window was open halfway and the white curtains swelled and filled like sails on an anchored boat ...
I felt good and fulfilled, too, but whereas Mary dives for sleep, I didn't want to go to sleep. I wanted to go on fully tasting how good I felt.”

— John Steinbeck

“When you believe in your way, enlightenment is there. But when you cannot believe in the meaning of the practice which you are doing in this moment, you cannot do anything. You are just wandering around the goal with your monkey mind. You are always looking for something without knowing what you are doing. If you want to see something, you should open your eyes. When you do not understand Bodhidharma's Zen, you are trying to look at something with your eyes closed. We do not slight the idea of attaining enlightenment, but the most important thing is this moment, not some day in the future. We have to make our effort in this moment. This is the most important thing for our practice.”

— Shunryu Suzuki

“Some paintings become famous because, being durable, they are viewed by successive generations, in each of which are likely to be found a few appreciative eyes.
I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all, except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush, and it is the same river who, before I can bring my friends to view his work, erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.
Like other artists, my river is temperamental; there is no predicting when the mood to paint will come upon him, or how long it will last. But in midsummer, when the great white fleets cruise the sky for day after flawless day, it is worth strolling down to the sandbars just to see whether he has been at work.”

— Aldo Leopold

“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”

— Herman Melville

“Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

“Unlike we are, unlike, O princely Heart!
Unlike our uses and our destinies ...
Thou, bethink thee, art
A guest for queens to social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears even can make mine ...
What hast though to do
With looking from the lattice-lights at me,
A poor, tired, wandering singer ...”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“I had always liked darkness. When I was small I was afraid of it if I was alone, but when I was with other I loved it and the change to the world it brought. Running around in the forest or between houses was different in the darkness, the world was enchanted, and we, we were breathless adventurers with blinking eyes and pounding hearts.
When I was older there was little I liked better than to stay up at night, the silence and the darkness had an allure, they carreid the promise of something immense. And autumn was my favorite season, wandering along the road by the river in the dark and the rain, not much could beat that.
But this darkness was different. This darkness rendered everything lifeless. It was static, it was the same whether you were awake or asleep, and it became harder and harder to motivate yourself to get up in the morning.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“Still, I could have been kinder." She frowned, her eyes wandering. "Sibling relationships can be complex. I wonder, sometimes, if my own actions had some bearing upon the paths my brothers chose. Could I have been a better sister to them? Perhaps, as a young ymbryne, I was too focused on myself.”

— Ransom Riggs

“The two creatures were sexless. But he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female). Malacandra seemed to him to have the look of one standing armed, at the ramparts of his own remote archaic world, in ceaseless vigilance, his eyes ever roaming the earth-ward horizon whence his danger came long ago. "A sailor's look," Ransom once said to me; "you know ... eyes that are impregnated with distance." But the eyes of Perelandra opened, as it were, inward, as if they were the curtained gateway to a world of waves and murmurings and wandering airs, of life that rocked in winds and splashed on mossy stones and descended as the dew and arose sunward in thin-spun delicacy of mist. On Mars the very forests are of stone; in Venus the lands swim. For now he thought of them no more as Malacandra and Perelandra. He called them by their Tellurian names. With deep wonder he thought to himself, "My eyes have seen Mars and Venus. I have seen Ares and Aphrodite.”

— C.S. Lewis

“What does Mad-Eye say happened?" asked Mr. Weasley, unscrewing the ink bottle, loading up his quill, and preparing to take notes. Mr. Diggory's head rolled its eyes. "Says he heard an intruder in his yard. Says he was creeping toward the house, but was ambushed by his dustbins." "What did the dustbins do?" asked Mr. Weasley, scribbling frantically. "Made one hell of a noise and fired rubbish everywhere, as far as I can tell," said Mr. Diggory. "Apparently one of them was still rocketing around when the please-men turned up -" Mr. Weasley groaned. "And what about the intruder?" "Arthur, you know Mad-Eye," said Mr. Diggory's head, rolling its eyes again. "Someone creeping into his yard in the dead of night? More likely there's a very shell-shocked cat wandering around somewhere, covered in potato peelings. But if the Improper Use of Magic lot get their hands on Mad-Eye, he's had it - think of his record -”

— J.K. Rowling

“And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.”

— Peter Matthiessen

“There are always a few bored audience members at an opera, especially by the time act four comes along. Those particular eyes would be wandering around the hall, searching for something, anything, interesting to watch. Those eyes would land on the little demon downstage right, unless they were distracted.
Right on cue, a large stage lamp broke free of its clamp in the rigging and swung on its cable into the back canvas. [ ... ]
On his way though the lobby minutes later, Artemis was highly amuse to overhear several audience members gushing over the unorthodox direction of the opera's final scene. The exploding lamp, muse one buff, was doubtless a metaphor for Norma's own falling star. But no, argued a second. The lamp was obviously a modernistic interpretation of the burning stake that Norma was about to face.
Or perhaps, thought Artemis as he pushed through the crowd to find a light Sicilian mist falling on his forehead, the exploding lamp was simply an exploding lamp.”

— Eoin Colfer

“After an hour my senses begin to vibrate in a definite rhythm, I tune into the great stillness, I tune in. I gaze at the crescent moon sitting like a white shell in the sky, and I have a feeling of love for it, I feel I'm blushing. It's the moon, I say softly and passionately, it's the moon! And my heart beats toward it with a gentle throbbing. It lasts for several minutes. It blows a little, a strange wind is coming, an unusual blast of air. What is it? I look around and see no one. The wind calls me and my soul bows in answer to the call,37 I feel myself lifted out of my sphere, pressed to an invisible breast, my eyes are moist with tears, I tremble-God is somewhere near looking at me. This lasts for another few minutes. I turn my head, the strange blast of air is gone, and I see something like the back of a spirit wandering soundlessly through the forest. . . .”

— Knut Hamsun

“The eyes-the thousands of wandering, questioning, reproving eyes-they are all around us. They penetrate my clothes. They rip at my skin. They dour me.”

— Jessica Brody

“He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth - and not even as a traveler towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dreams,
Lover of loneliness, and wandering,
Of upcast eye, and tender pondering!
Thee must I praise above all other glories
That smile us on to tell delightful stories.”

— John Keats

“In the utter peace and stillness the world seemed holding its breath, a little apprehensively, drawing near to the fire to warm itself. There was none of that sense of urgeful, pushing life that robs even a calm spring day of the sense of silence; life was over and the year was just waiting, harboring its strength for the final storms and turmoil of its death. The warmth and the color of maturity was there, exultant and burning, visible to the eyes, but the prophecy of decay was felt in a faint shiver of cold at morning and evening and a tiny sigh of the elms at midnight when a wandering ghost of a wind plucked a little of their gold away from them.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

“Why did dogs make one want to cry? There was something so quiet and hopeless about their sympathy. Jasper, knowing something was wrong, as dogs always do. Trunks being packed. Cars being brought to the door. Dogs standing with drooping tails, dejected eyes. Wandering back to their baskets in the hall when the sound of the car dies away.”

— Daphne Du Maurier

“Stars flicker above, points of bright ice in a dark river. I pull a heavy sheepskin around my legs and stretch my feet toward the fire. Despite the cold, Liam plays his flute, the sound whistling through the night. Soon my eyes are heavy, my head nodding.I open my eyes at the deep melodious baritone of Salvius's voice telling a tale. Liam's flute is silent now. I have heard Salvius tell many tales on market days; he is known for his memory of wandering minstrels and mummers who visit us at Whitsunday and through Midsummer. Salvius is a mockingbird: he can give a fair charade of the rhythmic tones of any wandering bard or any noble of the Royal Court.In this darkness, his eyes catch the light like a cat in the night.”

— Ned Hayes

“A few days ago she had been wandering around with a swatch of black silk tied over her eyes. Syrio was teaching her to see with her ears and her nose and her skin, she told him. Before that, he had her doing spinds and back flips. "Arya, are you certain you want to persist in this?"
She nodded. "Tomorrow we're going to catch cats."
"Cats." Ned sighed.”

— George R.R. Martin

“First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers
she could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her head to keep back the wandering hair that would always get into her eyes
and still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her became alive the strange creatures of her little sister's dream.”

— Lewis Carroll

“It is growing cold. Winter is putting footsteps in the meadow. What whiteness boasts that sun that comes into this wood! One would say milk-colored maidens are dancing on the petals of orchids. How coldly burns our sun! One would say its rays of light are shards of snow, one imagines the sun lives upon a snow crested peak on this day. One would say she is a woman who wears a gown of winter frost that blinds the eyes. Helplessness has weakened me. Wandering has wearied my legs.”

— Roman Payne

“Was it a doubt - a fear - a wandering uncertainty seeking rest, but finding none - so tear-blinded were its eyes - Mr. Thornton, instead of being shocked, seemed to have through that very stage of thought himself, and could suggest where the exact ray of light was to be found, which should make the dark places plain. Man of action as he was, busy in the world's great battle, there was a deeper religion binding him to God in his heart, in spite of his strong willfulness, through all his mistakes, than Mr. Hale ever dreamed.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

“Oh, God. I'm in big trouble. Because I'm staring. I can't keep my eyes from ogling his chiseled triceps and biceps and every other eps ' he has. The butterflies in my stomach have just multiplied tenfold as my wandering gaze meets his.”

— Simone Elkeles

“New kits!" she rasped, eyes shining. Featherwhisker hurried toward the medicine den and nearly ran into Goosefeather, who was wandering out of the fern tunnel. "Watch where you're going!" Featherwhisker snapped. Then he froze. "Sorry!" But Goosefeather just shambled past his apprentice and stopped at the fresh-kill pile. "Leopardfoot's kitting!" Featherwhisker called after him. "I know, I know," Goosefeather muttered distractedly as he began pawing through the pile. Turning each piece of prey with his paw, he leaned down and inspected them closely.”

— Erin Hunter

“He opened his mouth. The words were there. He was about to say them when a jolt of terror went through him, the terror of someone who, wandering in a mist, pauses only to realise that they have stopped inches from the edge of a gaping abyss. The way she was looking at him - she could read what was in his eyes, he realised. It must have been written plainly there, like words on the page of a book. There had been no time, no chance, to hide it.
"Will," she whispered. "Say something, Will."
But there was nothing to say. There was only emptiness, as there had been before her. As there would always be.
'I have lost everything', Will thought. 'Everything.”

— Cassandra Clare

“Nothing happened. You will go tuck yourself up in your bed and remember nothing. Do not go wandering in these areas at night. You will meet unsavory men and bloodsucking fiends," Raphael told the girl, his eyes on hers, unwavering. "And go to church."
"Do you think your calling might be telling everyone in the world what to do?" Magnus asked as they were walking home.
Raphael regarded him sourly. He had such a sweet face, Magnus thought -the face of an innocent angel, and the soul of the crankiest person in the entire world.
"You should never wear that hat again."
"My point exactly," said Magnus.”

— Cassandra Clare

“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

“Westcliff looked affronted. "Are you telling me in earnest that you are considering giving up your employment, your ambitions, your future ... in favor of traveling the earth in a vardo?"
"Yes. I'm considering it."
Westcliff's coffee-colored eyes narrowed. "And you think after years of living a productive life in London that you would adjust happily to an existence of aimless wandering?"
"It's the life I was meant for. In your world, I'm nothing but a novelty."
"A damned successful novelty. And you have the opportunity to be a representative for your people-"
"God help me." Cam had begun to laugh helplessly. "If it ever comes to that, I should be shot.”

— Lisa Kleypas

“As long as you cling to your self, you will wander right and left, day and night, for thousands of years; and when, after all that effort, you finally open your eyes, you will see your self, through inherent defects, wandering round itself like the ox in a mill; but, if, once freed of your self, you finally get down to work, this door will open to you within two minutes.”

— Sanai

“If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes.”

— Julian Assange

“The competition for the future of crime fiction is fierce, as it should be, but don't take your eyes off Craig McDonald. He's wily, talented and-rarest of the rare-a true original. He writes melancholy poetry that actually has melancholy poets wandering around, but don't turn your backs on them, either. I am always eager to see what he's going to do next.”

— Laura Lippman

“Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters gold.”

— Thomas Gray

“I might mention all the divine charms of a bright spring day, but if you had never in your life utterly forgotten yourself in straining your eyes after the mounting lark, or in wandering through the still lanes when the fresh-opened blossoms fill them with a sacred silent beauty like that of fretted aisles, where would be the use of my descriptive catalogue?”

— George Eliot

“Vice repeated is like the wandering wind, blows dust in others' eyes to spread itself.”

— William Shakespeare