Quotes About Wishing

“Girls spilled drinks down their dresses and flicked their hair. Wishing anyone, maybe even you, would notice them ... You were someone to me.”

— Kate Chisman

“I know why people die of hopelessness. It comes on like a thick blanket, covering your thoughts, your confidence, creeping into your mind and filling the corners. I lie in the dark, suffocating under horrible dispare, wishing I were dead. I sleep, then wake, then sleep. The sleep is filled with monstrous dreams that attack, cry out, and vanish, leaving me once more awake and staring into the darkness. Help me! My mind is screaming, but there is no one to hear.”

— Joan Lowery Nixon

“The spirit of complaint is born out of an unwillingness to trust God with today.
Like the Israelites, it means you are spending your time looking back toward Egypt or wishing for the future all the while missing what God is doing right now.”

— Priscilla Shirer

“Grace works ahead of us to draw us toward faith, to begin its work in us. Even the first fragile intuition of conviction of sin, the first intimation of our need of God, is the work of preparing, prevening grace, which draws us gradually toward wishing to please God. Grace is working quietly at the point of our desiring, bringing us in time to despair over our own unrighteousness, challenging our perverse dispositions, so that our distorted wills cease gradually to resist the gift of God.”

— Thomas C. Oden

“I know you think I've behaved like a cad, so I'm coming clean. I love you, Tess. I have for a long time. I ache for you. Every morning I wake up, wishing you were in my arms. Back when Cassie was at her mom's, I was relieved to be thinking about you and not her so much anymore, until I realized it meant that I was in love with you. I fell for you that first morning, when I saw you coming out of the garage with Dave. I couldn't tell you the other day, but I wanted you to know." He leaned in and kissed her cheek. "Maybe I have been protecting myself, but mostly, I wanted to protect you.”

— Lilly Christine

“Remember that yours is not the only heart that may be wishing for love.”

— Cameron Dokey

“In wishing to know ourselves fully, we must forget our quest for gain and seek only completion. At a certain point in our development, we no longer even seek to become Mystic, Magister, Sorcerer, or Witch: we seek only our own perfection in the wholeness of our Will, in the joining of light with dark and strength with love. We are varied and gorgeous yet pure of heart. Our aim is this: to know ourselves and to know the world.”

— T. Thorn Coyle

“We can't change things by wishing. Only by doing. It's our actions, Tara, not our thoughts.”

— Jennifer McMahon

“She herself was of the opinion that there would have been no need for a wish consultant if grammar had been taught properly in schools, so that mundanes could be trained to mean exactly what they said. Not wishing to be rude to her guest, however, she kept this opinion to herself.”

— P.B. Kerr

“Stop thinking like Alice in Wonderland, Celia told herself sternly. You're a grown-up, it's no use shutting your eyes, wishing things would happen”

— Maeve Binchy

“If there's a feeling to home, it's this. A place where there are no secrets, where nothing stays buried; not the past and not yourself. Where you can be all the versions of you, see it all reflected back at you as you walk the same stairs, the same halls, the same rooms. Feel the ghost of your mother as you sit at the kitchen table, hear the words of your father circling round and round after dinner, and your brother stopping by, wishing you'd be a little better, a little stronger ... It's four walls echoing back everything you've ever been and everything you've ever done, and it's the people who stay despite it all. Through it all. For it all.”

— Megan Miranda

“Wishing is bad," he said again. "It makes you hurt. Makes all the missing parts hurt, makes them open up new and makes them bleed."
xxx
"You take out a part of you," Roosevelt murmured. "Take it out and blow on it and toss it to the winds like dust, and you say, 'Find all the missing parts of me. Go out among the world and find the missing parts of me.' But instead of getting back what you lost you just lose more. Wishing is bad. Wish long enough and there won't be any of you left.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

“It is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.”

— Niccolò Machiavelli

“He gently covered her hand with his, wishing he could feel her soft skin through the rough leather of his work gloves. He dragged her fingers down from his mouth and cradled them against his chest. His gaze never left her face. Her breath caught in her throat, but she didn't look away. Fingers splayed, her palm pressed against the thin cotton of his shirt, directly over his heart. In that moment, he knew she belonged to him.”

— Karen Witemeyer

“A goal stood before Siddhartha, a single goal: to become empty, empty of thirst, empty of wishing, empty of dreams, empty of joy and sorrow. Dead to himself, not to be a self any more, to find tranquility with an emptied heard, to be open to miracles in unselfish thoughts, that was his goal. Once all of my self was overcome and had died, once every desire and every urge was silent in the heart, then the ultimate part of me had to awake, the innermost of my being, which is no longer my self, the great secret.”

— Hermann Hesse

“For some days I haunted the spot where these scenes had taken place, sometimes wishing to see you, sometimes resolved to quit the world and its miseries forever. At length I wandered towards these mountains, and have ranged through their immense recesses, consumed by a burning passion which you alone can gratify. We may not part until you have promised to comply with my requisition. I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create.”

— Mary Shelley

“I loved climbing because of the freedom, and having time and space. I remember coming off Everest for the last time, thinking of Dad and wishing that he could have seen what I saw. He would have loved it.”

— Bear Grylls

“The main thing I've learned is that we all have to learn to work with - and appreciate - the brain we've been given, and not waste time wishing things were easier.”

— Laini Taylor

“It was so kind of you to write to me about your experiences during the Occupation. At the war's end, I, too, promised myself that I had done with talking about it. I had talked and lived war for six years, and I was longing to pay attention to something - anything - else. But that is like wishing I were someone else. The war is now the story of our lives, and there's no subtracting it.”

— Mary Ann Shaffer

“8But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and t a thousand years as one day. 9 u The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise v as some count slowness, but w is patient toward you, [1] x not wishing that any should perish, but y that all should reach repentance. 10But z the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then a the heavens will pass away with a roar, and b the heavenly bodies [2] will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. [3] 11Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, c what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, 12 d waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and e the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! 13But according to his promise we are waiting for f new heavens and a new earth g in which righteousness dwells.”

— Anonymous.

“And sometimes, sometimes, wanting things, wishing for, working for them, is a good thing. Otherwise, we become nothing but spoiled boys and girls frustrated that we don't get every new toy we see.”

— Lisa Tawn Bergren

“One of the key strategies of faith is to tackle fear not by belittling the fear or wishing it away but by taking our eyes off of that which makes us afraid and looking to God.”

— Anonymous.

“And such is your definition of matrimony and dancing. Taken in that light, certainly their resemblance is not striking; but I think I could place them in such a view. You will allow that in both man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal; that in both it is an engagement between man and woman, formed for the advantage of each; and that when once entered into, they belong exclusively to each other till the moment of its dissolution; that it is their duty each to endeavor to give the other no cause for wishing that he or she had bestowed themselves elsewhere, and their best interest to keep their own imaginations from wandering towards the perfections of their neighbors, or fancying that they should have been better off with any one else.”

— Jane Austen

“By the report which he hastened over to Kellynch to make, Admiral Croft was a native of Somersetshire, who having acquired a very handsome fortune, was wishing to settle in his own country, and had come down to Taunton in order to look at some advertised places in that immediate neighbourhood, which, however, had not suited him; that accidentally hearing
(it was just as he had foretold, Mr Shepherd observed, Sir Walter's concerns could not be kept a secret,)
accidentally hearing of the possibility of Kellynch Hall being to let, and understanding his (Mr Shepherd's) connection with the owner, he had introduced himself to him in order to make particular inquiries, and had, in the course of a pretty long conference, expressed as strong an inclination for the place as a man who knew it only by description could feel; and given Mr Shepherd, in his explicit account of himself, every proof of his being a most responsible, eligible tenant.”

— Jane Austen

“Bad men ... aim at getting more than their share of advantages, while in labor and public service they fall short of their share; and each man wishing for advantage to himself criticizes his neighbor and stands in his way; for if people do not watch it carefully the common weal is soon destroyed. The result is that they are in a state of faction, putting compulsion on each other but unwilling themselves to do what is just.”

— Aristotle

“I know genes are a big deal, son, but they're not the be-all and end-all." Rob slowed to a halt at the lights, wishing the dickhead behind would back off. "If they were, you'd be in a seafood salad and I'd be in prison.”

— Karen Traviss

“No use wishing now for any other sin.”

— Elvis Costello

“That chair -shall I ever forget it? Where the shadows fell on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep but glowing indigo alternated with stripes of an incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that they could be made of anything but blue fire. For what seemed an immensely long time I gazed without knowing, even without wishing to know, what it was that confronted me. At any other time I would have seen a chair barred with alternate light and shade. Today the percept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else. Garden furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow - these were no more than names and notions, mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event. The event was this succession of azure furnace doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic," Fogg said expansively. "It doesn't really make sense. It's a little too perfect, don't you think? If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so. Words and thoughts don't change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart-reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn't care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn't. You deal with it, and you get on with your life. "Little children don't know that. Magical thinking: that's what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.”

— Lev Grossman

“When you're trading well, you have a better mental attitude. When you're trading poorly, you start wishing and hoping. Instead of getting into trades you think will work, you end up getting into trades you hope will work.”

— Randy McKay

“It takes a few days for the transformation to be complete, depending on how much venom is in the bloodstream, how close the venom is to the heart. As long as the heart keeps beating, poison spreads, healing, changing the body as it moves through it. Eventually the heart stops, and the conversion is finished. But all the time, every minute of it, a victim would be wishing for death”

— Stephenie Meyer

“If they were going to be like that, then I just wished they hadn't actually been German. It was too easy. Too obvious. It was like coming across an Irishman who actually was stupid, a mother-in-law who actually was fat, or an American businessman who actually did have a middle initial and smoked a cigar. You feel as if you are unwillingly performing in a music-hall sketch and wishing you could rewrite the script. If Helmut and Kurt had been Brazilian or Chinese or Latvian or anything else at all, they could then have behaved in exactly the same way and it would have been surprising and intriguing and, more to the point from my perspective, much easier to write about. Writers should not be in the business of propping up stereotypes. I wondered what to do about it, decided that they could simply be Latvians if I wanted, and then at last drifted off peacefully to worrying about my boots.”

— Douglas Adams

“You ever hope for something so much? So much you can't sleep, so much your skull hurts? But the thing is, you don't even know if the thing you're wishing for is possible? You don't even know if it could happen? And it's all out of your control?”

— Anthony Doerr

“STOP wishing for a better tomorrow ... when you can keep working for a better today!”

— Timothy Pina

“It's like I am inside this ethereal sphere wherein exists no logic, no reasoning, no typicality, no explanations, no realism, no comparisons, nothing ordinary, and no normalcy. And then if you are to understand me, you have to step into my realm and leave all of those things behind. I'm not typical. I'm not ordinary. And I'm not normal. And I never will be -. So I don't see the point of waking up in the morning and wishing to be so.”

— C. JoyBell C.

“How can you respect a religion that forces women into polygamous marriages, mutilates their genitals, forbids them to drive cars and subjects them to the humiliation of 'instant' divorce? In fact, none of these practices are Islamic at all. Anyone wishing to understand Islam must first separate the religion from the cultural norms and style of a society.”

— Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood

“Prayer is life passionately wanting, wishing, desiring God's triumph. Prayer is life striving and toiling everywhere and always for that ultimate victory.”

— G. Campbell Morgan

“To go where you're wishing you could go, first you must tie your shoes and step off the porch.”

— John Avery

“You may have seen people praying to an image as if it had special power. Perhaps they're wishing for the well-being of their family, for material prosperity, or to recover from illness. But this way of practicing faith only leads to a dead end. Buddha images should serve as inspirations to cultivate the infinite loving kindness latent in the buddha within us.”

— Shinjo Ito

“A conscience is a troublesome thing at times. I woke up at 4 o'clock this morning and I spent the time feeling what a nothing I was, and wishing I was so very different. Then the morning's post brought me a letter from a friend, saying I was so this, so that - it made me really cry, I was so grateful.”

— Kate Greenaway

“All pain in life comes from wishing things were different than they are. Conversely, peace and happiness must come from accepting life as it is and breaking through the barriers of illusion to do so ... All things that we label good or bad often hold in them surprises if we stay open. Each of us has choice in how we interpret life's events and in this way we are each responsible for our own reality.”

— Kristine Carlson

“All the joy the world contains
Has come through wishing happiness for others.
All the misery the world contains
Has come through wanting pleasure for oneself.”

— Shantideva

“A blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts ... the body language of a man wishing urgently to be elsewhere.”

— Edward R. Murrow

“One of the strongest motives for wishing to work on yourself is the realization that you may die at any moment.”

— G.I. Gurdjieff

“The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas, as those of a fool are by his passions. The time of the one is long, because he does not know what to do with it; so is that of the other, because he distinguishes every moment of it with useful or amusing thoughts
or, in other words, because the one is always wishing it away, and the other always enjoying it.”

— Joseph Addison

“Craving that old sweet oneness yet dreading engulfment, wishing to be our mother's and yet be our own, we stormily swing from mood to mood, advancing and retreating-the quintessential model of two-mindedness.”

— Judith Viorst

“In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.”

— Cynthia Ozick

“A mind wishing to benefit other people and other sentient beings is the very basis of peace and happiness.”

— Dalai Lama

“Sickness disgusts us with death, and we wish to get well, which is a way of wishing to live. But weakness and suffering, with manifold bodily woes, soon discourage the invalid from trying to regain ground: he tires of those respites which are but snares, of that faltering strength, those ardors cut short, and that perpetual lying in wait for the next attack.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar