Quotes About Patience

Sometimes you know when doors will open; you have only to walk up to them and wait.

This made sense when I began to draw, creating the elements one image at a time until the world appeared on the paper.

Invention comes about when we let it, when we don't mind feeling stupid as we do it— it feels like what children do, it is what children do — when we clear a place for it, become quiet, and wait.

With her silence alone she held off, for a moment longer, the suggestion that the worst was over, the tree had fallen, the storm was passing, and time, as she was given to saying, was marching on: school tomorrow, work for their father, laundry, shopping, meals. For just a moment more, she let them linger.

In church she had prayed for contentment. She was thirty, with no husband in sight. A good job, an aging father, a bachelor brother, a few nice friends. At least, she had asked—so humbly, so earnestly, so seriously—let me be content.

It was a balancing act, to hold off quarrel and worry, the coming years, the coming months, even tomorrow morning for just whatever time it took to finish a sandwich, to drink the coffee while it was still hot. Careful now. All around them

In the end I had to realize that I cannot force love to come if it is not there in the first place.

She keeps on hoping from a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.

Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.

Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle— And hoping It will reach Japan.

The last days of May are among the longest of the year.

and all that time of care and confusion that seemed as if it would never end seems as if it never was.

There was still that strange hesitation and lightness about her, as if she were waiting for life to begin.

But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone.

The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away . But when people left they always came back.

Hold still, my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

About Grandma Lynn: She was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. At seventy, she had come to believe in time alone.

I focused very hard on the dead geranium in his line of vision. I thought if I could make it bloom he would have his answer. In my heaven it bloomed. In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist. On Earth nothing happened... I stood alone in a sea of bright petals.

I would do what I did best, I thought. I would wait. It was only a matter of time, after all.

Take deep breaths and hold them. Try to stay still for longer and longer periods of time. Make yourself small and like a stone. Curl the edges of yourself up and fold them under where no one else can see.

Pero esperaba con paciencia. Ya no creía en el poder de la palabra. Nunca salvaba nada. A los setenta años había acabado creyendo únicamente en el tiempo.

She likes a quiet life, has few close friends, and makes new ones slowly. ...'I want to work on my next book... and try to be here to garden a little in the fall, and read. I'm married to the man I want to be married to, live in a certain way that I like living. It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.

She had needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her, and I had, I now knew, given her that time, could give it, for it was what I had in great supply.

She likes a quiet life, has few close friends, and makes new ones slowly. … I want to work on my next book... and try to be here to garden a little in the fall, and read. I'm married to the man I want to be married to, live in a certain way that I like living. It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.