Stumbling Quotes - Page 3

• You are good when you are fully awake in your speech, Yet you are not evil when you sleep while your tongue staggers without purpose. And even stumbling speech may strengthen a weak tongue.

  Khalil Gibran

  Sleep, Evil, Purpose

  Khalil Gibran (2007). “Kahlil Gibran: Masterpieces”

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• Why did the achievers overcome problems while thousands are overwhelmed by theirs? They refused to hold on to the common excuses for failure. They turned their stumbling blocks into stepping stones. They realized that they couldn't determine every circumstance in life but they could determine their choice of attitude towards every circumstance.

  John C. Maxwell

  Attitude, Block, Choices

  John C. Maxwell (2010). “Maxwell 2in1 (Developing the Leader w/in You/Developing Leaders Around You)”, p.80, Thomas Nelson

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• That distinctive presidential conduct is now gone forever, banished to the snows of yesteryear by Barack Obama. From the beginning of his presidency to the present, he has spoken specifically and in unprecedented fashion of Republicans as his rivals, his stumbling blocks, the primary cause of his troubles.

  John Podhoretz

  Fashion, Block, Snow

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• You guys just wait and see. We'll stand taller than these mountains. We'll bare open our hearts for the world to grab. We'll see lights where there was dimness. We'll testify together to what we have seen and felt. Life will go on--all of us--crawling; stumbling, falling perhaps. But we will be the strong ones. Our hearts will shine brightly.

  Douglas Coupland

  Strong, Fall, Heart

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• ...what will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?

  Elizabeth Kostova

  Book, Wonder, Someday

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• Look, I need to tell you something,' I continued. The words came stumbling out of me. 'I couldnt stand it if...I dont want you to---' Percy?' she said. 'You look like you're going to be sick.' And that's how I felt.

  Rick Riordan

  Sick, Needs, Looks

  Rick Riordan (2007). “The Titan's curse”

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• Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleance me in the great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

  Oscar Wilde

  Sweet, Hurt, Stars

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.152, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the stumbling feet of men.

  Jack London

  Dog, Men, Fire

  Jack London, JACK LONDON (2015). “White Fang (Arcadia Classics)”, p.49, Jack London

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• Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Block, People, Strange

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• Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.

  W. H. Auden

  Christmas, Friday, Easter

  "Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry". Book by Anthony Hecht, p. 135, 2005.

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• At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall ALL the time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer.

  Chelsea Handler

  Love, Fall, Kissing

  Chelsea Handler (2005). “My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands”, p.181, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• It occurred to me, then, how nearly real life resembles the first rehearsal of a play. We are all of us stumbling through it, doing our best to say the proper lines and make the proper moves, but not quite comfortable yet in the parts we've been given. Still, like players who trust that -despite all evidence to the contrary- the whole mess will make sense eventually, we keep on going, hoping that somehow things will work out for the best.

  Gary L. Blackwood

  Real, Moving, Player

  Gary L. Blackwood (2003). “Shakespeare's Spy”, Dutton Childrens Books

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• If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.

  Rita Dove

  Children, Growing Up, Heart

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• Her lips on his could tell him better than all her stumbling words.

  Margaret Mitchell

  Love, Sexy, Kissing

  Margaret Mitchell (2016). “Gone with the Wind”, p.671, Hamilton Books

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• I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Faith, Prayer, Wings

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage”, p.79, Open Road Media

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• She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father stumbling home drunk. She was all of these things and of something more...It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life - the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

  Betty Smith

  Brother, Father, Flower

  BETTY SMITH (1943). “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”

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• New York being what it is, our museums are vertical, not horizontal. That means the stumbling blocks to architectural clarity are unavoidable - but certainly surmountable.

  Jerry Saltz

  New York, Block, Mean

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• You know that thing about Death Be Not Proud? Well, Fear Be Not Proud either. And Fear Be Not Elegant. What Fear be is stumbling, bumbling flight, crashing through brush, slip-sliding on pine needles, sloshing through puddles that are always deeper than you expect.

  Josh Lanyon

  Fear, Puddles, Proud

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• We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we're looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us.

  Charles de Lint

  Life, Ideas, Appreciate

  Charles de Lint (2007). “Tapping the Dream Tree”, p.212, Macmillan

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• Josh pulls me aside. "Hey, About before, I just... I wanted to say ... well, I think you're pretty special." He says, kind of stumbling over the words a little. Like he's hesitant to say them, now i wish he'd hug me again. And then kiss me. But he doesn't. He just waves and walks off. I sigh. "Hannah, I just... I want you to know if I pause alot when I tell you how special you are I want you to think that I'm... very... very... deep," Finn says

  Elizabeth Scott

  Kissing, Thinking, Special You

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• And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)

  Dennis Lehane

  Pain, Heart, Blood

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• A bus came. The soldier turned away from her and walked toward it. Tatiana watched him. Even his walk was from another world; the step was too sure, the stride too long, yet somehow it all seemed right, looked right, felt right. It was like stumbling on a book you thought you had lost. Ah, yes, there it is.

  Paullina Simons

  Book, Long, Soldier

  Paullina Simons (2009). “The Bronze Horseman”, p.32, Harper Collins

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• Just sit tight. Reinforcements should be here soon. Hopefully nothing happens before-" Lightning crackled overhead. The wind picked up with a vengeance. Worksheets flew into the Grand Canyon, and the entire bridge shuddered. Kids screamed, stumbling and grabbing the rails. "I had to say something," Hedge grumbled. He bellowed into his megaphone: "Everyone inside! The cow says moo! Off the skywalk!" "I thought you said this thing was stable!" Jason shouted over the wind. "Under normal circumstances," Hedge agreed, "which these aren't.

  Rick Riordan

  Kids, Wind, Bridges

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• It's like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it.

  Leonard Cohen

  Awkward, Cache, Honey

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• This whole time, my whole life, that harsh, stony path was leading up to this one point. I followed it blindly, stumbling along the way, scraped and weary, without any idea of where it was leading, without ever realizing that with every step I was approaching the light at the end of a very long, dark tunnel. And now that I've reached it, now that I'm here, I want to catch it in my hand, hold onto it forever to look back on - the point at which my new life really began.

  Tabitha Suzuma

  Dark, Tunnels, Light

  Tabitha Suzuma (2011). “Forbidden”, p.391, Simon and Schuster

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