Quotes About Patience

If I die, he whispered in the dark, dinna follow me. The bairns will need ye. Stay for them. I can wait.

Between hell now, and hell later, Sassenach, he said, his speech measured and precise, I will take later, every time.

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop. The line from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland drifted through my mind, and I smiled. Good advice, I supposed – but only if you happened to know where the beginning was, and I didn't quite.

The mountains had their own time, and a wise man did not try to hurry them.

They do say that God protects fools—but I think even the Almighty will lose patience now and then.

Sometimes twenty years seemed like an instant, and sometimes it seemed like a very long time indeed.

If I die," he whispered in the dark, "dinna follow me. The bairns will need ye. Stay for them. I can wait.

I mean to take my time about it, aye?

You'll have to keep it up for longer than that, if you expect ecstatic moans," I answered. "Two minutes doesn't deserve any more than a giggle.

If I were marooned here till it suited my overbearing, domineering, pig-headed jackass of a husband to finish risking his stupid neck, I'd use the time to see what I could spot.

But war has a long fuse, and a slow match.

We dangled our feet in the water, moving from shade to sun and back to shade as we grew too warm, talking of this and that and not much of anything, both aware of each other's smallest movement, both content to wait until chance should bring us to that moment when a glance should linger, and a touch should signal more.

I had realized many years before why "patients" are called that; it's because a sick person is generally incapacitated, and thus obliged to put up with any amount of harassment and annoyance from persons who are not sick.

Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach. Ye canna say more than ye know, but tell me it all, just once more.

But you are not God, and there are limits to what you can expect of yourself.

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.

And that, ma chère madame, is all I can tell you—no more than I can tell any troubled soul who comes to me for advice: put your trust in God, and pray for guidance." He shoved the fresh pastry toward me. "But whatever you are to do, you will

Often people who are very ill, but are near their birthday, seem to wait until it's passed before dying. I

And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed.

Then ye live with it, laddie, he said softly. That's all.

Act as though this one patient is the only person in the world—because to do otherwise is to lose that one, too. One at a time, that's all you can do. And you learn not to despair over all the ones you can't help, but only to do what you can.

Here we stopped, turning our horses over to the attention of a hostler, who moved so slowly as to seem ossified.

left me studying the birds, with the assurance that he would shortly

It may," the deeper voice agreed. "It may rain straight up tomorrow instead of down, as well. That doesna mean I'll stand waiting at the stairhead wi' my wee bucket turned upside down.