Late Quotes - Page 21

I thought that if the right time gets missed, if one has refused or been refused something for too long, it's too late, even if it is finally tackled with energy and received with joy. Or is there no such thing as "too late"? Is there only "late," and is "late" always better than "never"? I don't know.

Bernhard Schlink

Long, Joy, Energy

FaceBook post by Bernhard Schlink from Jun 30, 2010

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As I settled down to sleep in that new bed in the dark city, I saw that it was too late now, too late for everything. I would not be given a second chance. In the hours when I woke, I have to tell you that this struck me almost with relief.

Colm Toibin

Sleep, Dark, Second Chance

Colm Toibin (2012). “The Empty Family: Stories”, p.84, Simon and Schuster

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Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.

Milan Kundera

Vocabulary, Together, Too Late

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Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizen should be: partisans but never zealots, respectors of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely unable to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered . . . or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power.

Stephen King

Falling In Love, Book, Responsibility

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I know of no other practise which will make one more attractive in conversation than to be well-read in a variety of subjects. There is a great potential within each of us to go on learning. Regardless of our age, unless there be serious illness, we can read, study, drink in the writings of wonderful men and women. It is never too late to learn.

Gordon B. Hinckley

Writing, Men, Serious Illness

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Our radio plays rhythm and blues as we pass the joint back and forth in jutjawed silence both looking ahead with big private thoughts now so vast we can't communicate them anymore and if we tried it would take a million years and a billion books - Too late, too late, the history of everything we've seen together and separately has become a library in itself - The shelves pile higher - They're full of misty documents or documents of the Mist-.

Jack Kerouac

Book, Years, Play

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In referring to her earlier statement that he had was not her type because he was "a dollar short when it came to maturity and a day late when it came to peace." I may have been wrong about that," she conceded. "You are a complicated man, but happily complicated. You have found a way to be at home with the world's confusion, a way to embrace the chaos rather than struggle to reduce it or become its victim. It's all part of the game to you, and you are delighted to play. In that regard, you may have reached a more elevated plateau of harmony than...ummph.

Tom Robbins

Struggle, Home, Maturity

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What happens if your choice is misguided, You must try to correct it But what if it’s too late? What if you can’t? Then you must find a way to live with it.

Libba Bray

Choices, What If, Trying

Libba Bray (2015). “The Gemma Doyle Trilogy”, p.226, Delacorte Press

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It's only life. We all get through it. Not all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in acidents or altercations, while others skate through the years with nothing worse to worry about than an occassional bad-hair day. I still possessed both legs and both eyes, and even my hair looked all right when I rose that Wednesday morning in late January. If I returned to bed sixteen hours later, having lost all my hair but nothing else, I would consider the day a triumph. Even minus a few teeth, I'd call it a triumph.

Dean Koontz

Morning, Eye, Journey

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It was an overcast late November morning, the grass splintered by hoarfrost, and winter grinning through the gaps in the clouds like a bad clown peering through the curtains before the show begins.

John Connolly

Morning, Winter, Clouds

John Connolly (2012). “The John Connolly Collection #2: The White Road, The Black Angel, and The Unquiet”, p.899, Simon and Schuster

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He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

Cormac McCarthy

Heart, Air, Wind

Cormac McCarthy (2010). “The Road”, p.10, Pan Macmillan

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The halls were empty. Charlotte had missed the first bell and would be late, again. Her homeroom teacher would ask her for an excuse and she would say, 'Overwhelming feeling of dread.' That was going to go over nicely.

Anne Ursu

Teacher, Feelings, Would Be

Anne Ursu (2008). “The Siren Song”, p.27, Simon and Schuster

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A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most People live in denial of Death's patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.

Dean Koontz

Death, Men, People

Dean Koontz (2007). “The Husband: A Novel”, p.12, Bantam

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For ten years I had been protected, wrapped up in something like a blanket that had been stitched together from all kinds of different things. But people never notice that warmth until after they've emerged. You don't even notice that you've been inside until it's too late for you ever to go back-- that's how perfect the temperature of that blanket is.

Banana Yoshimoto

Years, People, Perfect

Banana Yoshimoto, Michael Emmerich (2002). “Goodbye Tsugumi”, p.32, Grove Press

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Suddenly I realize that this is what I've been waiting for - a man who depends entirely on me... I dreamed for years of a man who couldn't live without me, a man who pictured my face when he closed his eyes, who loved me when I was a mess in the morning and when dinner was late and even when I overloaded the washing machine and burned out the motor. [My son] stares up at me as if I can do no wrong. I have always wanted someone who treats me the way he does; I just didn't know that I'd have to give birth to him.

Jodi Picoult

Morning, Eye, Son

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A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.

E. M. Forster

Death, Men, Funeral

E.M. Forster (2015). “Howards End”, p.101, Sheba Blake Publishing

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Hassan and I looked at each other. Cracked up. The Hindi kid would soon learn what the British learned earlier in the century, and what the Russians would eventually learn by the late 1980's: that Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish customs but abhor rules. And so it was with kite fighting. The rules were simple: No rules. Fly your kite. Cut the opponents. Good luck.

Khaled Hosseini

Kids, Independent, Good Luck

Khaled Hosseini (2011). “The Kite Runner: Rejacketed”, p.45, A&C Black

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I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

Kurt Vonnegut

Night, Alcohol, Slaughterhouse Five

Harold Bloom, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (2009). “Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five”, p.129, Infobase Publishing

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I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it's very difficult to find anyone.' I should think so — in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!

J. R. R. Tolkien

Adventure, Thinking, Use

J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Hobbit”, p.7, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Yes, I am a pirate two hundred years too late.

Jimmy Buffett

Years, Two, Pirate

Song: A Pirate Looks At Forty, Album: A1A, 1974

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But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony - forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

Erich Maria Remarque

Mother, Men, Hands

"Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front)". Book by Erich Maria Remarque, 1929.

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She sat down on one of her grandmother's uncomfortable armchairs, and the cat sprang up into her lap and made itself comfortable. The light that came through the picture window was daylight, real golden late-afternoon daylight, not a white mist light. The sky was a robin's-egg blue, and Coraline could see trees and, beyond the trees, green hills, which faded on the horizon into purples and grays. The sky had never seemed so sky, the world had never seemed so world ... Nothing, she thought, had ever been so interesting.

Neil Gaiman

Real, Cat, Grandmother

Neil Gaiman (2012). “Coraline”, p.162, A&C Black

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It's not the side-effects of the cocaine - I'm thinking that it must be love. It's too late to be grateful, It's too late to be hateful, It's too late to be late again, The European cannon is here.

David Bowie

Grateful, Thinking, Sides

"Song: 'Station To Station'". 1976.

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She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that he had her trapped by the heart. And like any unwilling animal that was well and truly caught, she could escape only by leaving a piece of herself behind.

Jodi Picoult

Heart, Animal, Leaving

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Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.

Douglas Adams

Arriving, Would Be, Hours

Douglas Adams (2014). “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”, p.28, Simon and Schuster

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