WAITING QUOTES

Quotes about Waiting

The waiting time, my brothers,

Is the hardest time of all.

SARAH DOUDNEY, The Hardest Time of All

Waiting [is] the great vocation of the dispossessed.

MARY GORDON, New York Times, Nov. 3, 1985

We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.

LUIGI PIRANDELLO, Henry IV

When you are waiting for a train, don’t keep perpetually looking to see if it is coming. The time of its arrival is the business of the conductor, not yours. It will not come any sooner for all your nervous glances and your impatient pacing, and you will save strength if you will keep quiet. After we discover that the people who sit still on a long railroad journey reach that journey’s end at precisely the same time as those who “fuss” continually, we have a valuable piece of information which we should not fail to put to practical use.

ANNA C. BRACKETT, The Technique of Rest

Misfortune always comes to those who wait. The trick is to find happiness in the brief gaps between disasters.

I had tended to view waiting as mere passivity. When I looked it up in my dictionary however, I found that the words passive and passion come from the same Latin root, pati, which means "to endure." Waiting is thus both passive and passionate. It's a vibrant, contemplative work. It means descending into self, into God, into the deeper labyrinths of prayer. It involves listening to disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and undiscovered, the places one lives falsely. It means struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and molding the courage to live that vision.