"Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?"
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"if pain must come, may it come quickly. because i have a life to live, and i need to live it in the best possible. if he has to make a choice, may he make it now. then i will either wait for him or forget him. waiting is painful. forgetting is painful. but not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering."
— Paulo Coelho

"Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
— Franz Kafka

"So tonight I reach for my journal again. This is the first time I’ve done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I’m scared they will never leave. I say that I don’t want to take the drugs anymore, but I’m frightened I will have to. I am terrified that I will never really pull my life together.
In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me all the certainties I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. This is what I find myself writing on the page:

I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long. I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and Braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.

Tonight, this strange interior gesture of friendship—the lending of a hand from
me to myself when nobody else is around to offer solace—reminds me of something that happened to me once in New York City. I walked into an office building one afternoon in a hurry, dashed into the waiting elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glance of myself in a security mirror’s reflection. In that moment, my brain did an odd thing—it fired off this split-second message: “Hey! You know her! That’s a friend of yours!” And I actually ran forward toward my own reflection with a smile, ready to welcome that girl whose name I had lost but whose face was so familiar. In a flash instant of course, I realized my mistake and laughed in embarrassment at my almost doglike confusion over how a mirror works. But for some reason that incident comes to mind again tonight during my sadness in Rome, and I find myself writing this comforting reminder at the bottom of the page.

Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a FRIEND…

I fell asleep holding my notebook pressed against my chest, open to this most recent assurance. In the morning when I wake up, I can still smell a faint trace of depression’s lingering smoke, but he himself is nowhere to be seen. Somewhere during the night, he got up and left. And his buddy loneliness beat it, too."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"I don't believe that old cliche that good things come to those who wait. I think good things come to those who want something so bad they can't sit still."
— Ashton Kutcher

"Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window."
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them."
— Haruki Murakami

"Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass; It's about learning to dance in the rain!"
— Jean E. Howard

"When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."
— Wendell Berry (Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays)

"The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter."
— Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decides to Die: A Novel of Redemption)

"so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor)

"We are like roses that have never bothered to
bloom when we should have bloomed and
it is as if
the sun has become disgusted with
waiting"
— Charles Bukowski

"A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen

"The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."
— Eden Phillpotts

"I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen."
— Louis L'Amour (Sackett's Land)

"When you were little, endure your parents’ warnings, then wait for them to leave the room, pry loose protective covers and consider inserting some metal object into an electrical outlet?

Did you wonder if for once you might light up the room?

When you were big enough to cross the street on your own, did you ever wait for a signal, hear the frenzied approach of a fire truck and feel like stepping out in front of it?

Did you wonder just how far that rocket ride might take you?

When you were almost grown, did you ever sit in a bubble bath, perspiration pooling, notice a blow dryer plugged in within easy reach, and think about dropping it into the water?

Did you wonder if the expected rush might somehow fail you?

And now, do you ever dangle your toes over the precipice, dare the cliff to crumble, defy the frozen deity to suffer the sun, thaw feather and bone, take wing to fly you home?"
— Ellen Hopkins (Burned)

"She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become."
— Marguerite Duras (The Ravishing of Lol Stein)

"The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don't wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy."
— Thich Nhat Hanh (The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching)

"Well, you'll have to wait til tomorrow. I'm out of commission. Look, jammies.
-Jace Wayland"
— Cassandra Clare (The Mortal Instruments Boxed Set: City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass)

"Once you stop pretending that everything's shitty and you can't wait to get out of it...then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it's not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good. "
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive."
— Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)

"I don't know exactly where ideas come from, but when I'm working well ideas just appear. I've heard other people say similar things - so it's one of the ways I know there's help and guidance out there. It's just a matter of our figuring out how to receive the ideas or information that are waiting to be heard."
— Jim Henson

"When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny."
— Paulo Coelho (The Devil and Miss Prym: A Novel of Temptation)

"A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper."
— E.B. White

"I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things."
— Tom Waits

"“Apparently people don't like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit, then maybe just once, one of them will say, 'Oh! Wait a minute - I was wrong.' I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you.”"
— Lemmy of Motorhead

"... you don't have to wait for someone to treat you bad repeatedly. All it takes is once, and if they get away with it that once, if they know they can treat you like that, then it sets the pattern for the future. "
— Jane Green (Bookends: A Novel)

"I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

"To love would be an awfully big adventure."
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

""But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry."
— Jack Kerouac

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?
— The Mad Hatter"
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"To die will be an awfully big adventure."
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

"Curiouser and curiouser."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It's all a question of how I view my life."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket."
— Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame)

"Door: Why it's simply impassible!
Alice: Why, don't you mean impossible?
Door: No, I do mean impassible. (chuckles) Nothing's impossible!"
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"Life is a blank canvas, and you need to throw all the paint on it you can."
— Danny Kaye

"All right, then, I'll go to hell."
— Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)

"Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!"

"Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.""
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass)

"...if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"We love because it's the only true adventure."
— Nikki Giovanni

"If you don't know where you want to go, then it does not matter where you go... "
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"Adventures are all very well in their place, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain."
— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

"I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.""
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"'I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir,' said Alice, 'Because I'm not myself you see.'"
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.

Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on."
— Ray Bradbury (Green Shadows, White Whale: A Novel of Ray Bradbury's Adventures Making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland)

"Adventure without risk is Disneyland"
— Douglas Coupland