Having Second Thoughts Quotes

What else do you want to know?' he asked. Possessed by morbid curiosity, her eyes darted to the scar that cut just over his ear. She'd found it shortly after they met, while he lay unconscious in the grass. He didn't need to ask what had caught her attention. 'I got that in a fight against imperial soldiers. Ask me why.' She shook her head, unable to bring herself to do it. The cocoon of warmth that had enveloped the entire afternoon unwound itself in an instant. 'Are you having second thoughts about being here with me?' He planted a hand into the grass, edging closer. 'No. I trust you.' He was giving her all the time in the world to shove him away, to rise, to flee. Her heartbeat quickened as she watched him. Moving ever so slowly, he braced an arm on either side of her, his fingers sinking into the moss. 'I asked you to come with me.' Despite her words, she dug her heels into the ground and inched backwards. 'I feel safe with you.' 'I can see that.' He affected a lazy smile as she retreated until her back pressed against the knotted roots that crawled along the ground. His boldness was so unexpected, so exciting. She held her breath and waited. Her pulse jumped when he reached for her. She'd been imagining this moment ever since their first duel and wondering whether it would take another swordfight for him to come near her again. His fingers curled gently against the back of her neck, giving her one last chance to escape. Then he lowered his mouth and kissed her.

Jeannie Lin

Life is full of tough decisions, Chase. Decisions that may make a person seem horrible, when in reality that decision was the most humane thing they could have done. A person isn't horrible for having second thoughts, for realizing they've made a mistake and deciding to correct it before it's too late. What makes a person horrible is when they do nothing. When they string other people along with them through their misery when they could have let them go and find happiness elsewhere. What's horrible is seeing the light leave your eyes and taking theirs with it. ~ Sara Furlong Burr

I was having second thoughts. And third and fourth ones. ~ Lisa M. Basso

I think," Berta remarked with a proud little smile when she was seated alone in the drawing room beside Elizabeth, "he's having second thoughts about proposing, milday."
"I think he was silently contemplating the easiest way to murder me at dinner," Elizabeth said, chuckling. She was about to say more when the butler interrupted them to announce that Lord Marchman wished to have a private word with Lady Cameron in his study.
Elizabeth prepared for another battle of wits-or witlessness, she thought with an inner smile-and dutifully followed the butler down a dark hall furnished in brown and into a very large study where the earl was seated in a maroon chair at a desk on her right.
"You wished to see-" she began as she stepped into his study, but something on the wall beside her brushed against her hair. Elizabeth turned her head, expecting to see a portrait hanging there, and instead found herself eye-to-fang with an enormous bear's head. The little scream that tore from her was very real this time, although it owed to shock, not to fear.
"It's quite dead," the earl said in a voice of weary resignation, watching her back away from his most prized hunting trophy with her hand over her mouth.
Elizabeth recovered instantly, her gaze sweeping over the wall of hunting trophies, then she turned around.
"You may take your hand away from your mouth," he stated. Elizabeth fixed him with another accusing glare, biting her lip to hide her smile. She would ha ~ Judith McNaught

Chloe had her knees pulled up, one arm wrapped around them. Her other hand was entwined with Derek's. He leaned back against the tree. Slumping, as if it was holding him up. His face glowed with sweat and his eyes were closed.
When I'd seen Derek in wolf form, I figured werewolves grew when they shifted, like the ones in movies. They didn't. He was really that big. Even slumped, he was more than a head taller then Chloe. A huge football player of a guy.
Beside me, Daniel whispered, "I was going to tell him off for bullying you. But I'm having second thoughts."
I smiled at him. "I don't blame you."
Despite his size, Derek was obviously no older than us. His cheeks were dotted with mild acne and I could see the ghosts of fading pocks, as if it had been much worse not too long ago. Dark hair tumbled into his eyes as he rested with his head bent forward. ~ Kelley Armstrong

Once in a while you start having second thoughts, then you read a letter from someone that lifts your spirits so much - it really makes a huge difference. I love reading them. ~ Corbin Bleu

Where do I belong?"
"With me," my mother and Galen say in unison. They exchange hard glares. Galen locks his jaw.
"I'm her mother," she tells Galen, her voice sharp. "Her place is with me."
"I want her for my mate," Galen says. The admission warms up the space between us with an impossible heat and I want to melt into him. His words, his declaration, cannot be unspoken. And how he's declared it to everyone who matters. It's out there in the open, hanging in the air. He wants me for his mate. Me. Him. Forever. And I'm not sure how I feel about that. How I should feel about that.
I've known for some time that he wanted that eventually, but how soon? Before we graduate? Before I go to college? What does it mean to mate with him? He's a Triton prince. His place is with the Syrena, in the ocean. And let's not forget that my place with them is dead-no Half-Breeds allowed. We have so much to talk about before this can even happen, but I feel saying so might make him feel rejected, or embarrass him in front of his older brother, the great Triton king. Or like I'm having second thoughts, and I'm not. Not exactly.
I peer up at him, wanting to see his eyes, to see the promise in them that I heard in his voice.
But he won't look at me. He's not looking at Mom, either. He keeps his iron glare on Grom, unyielding and demanding. But Grom doesn't wither under the weight of it. In fact, he deflects it with an indifferent expression. They are definitely engaging i ~ Anna Banks

Having second thoughts?" Puck's voice was soft and dangerous, a far cry from his normal flippancy. "I thought we put this behind us for now."
"Never," I said, matching his stare. "I can't ever take it back, Goodfellow. I'm still going to kill you. I swore to her I would." Lighting flickered overhead, and thunder rumbled in the distance as we faced each other with narrowed eyes. "One day," I said softly. "One day you'll look up, and I'll be there. That's the only ending for us. Don't ever forget. ~ Julie Kagawa

I was so happy it was like a food, like I'd been stuffed with it, a foie gras goose of happiness; happy enough to know, fully, that I was happy, and foolishly, for one second, to dare the thought: "Imagine - imagine if each Saturday morning could be like this," and in the middle of the singing, I blushed, not even looking at her, because even just having it I knew there was something wrong about the thought. Another boundary crossing - an acknowledgment to myself, so fleeting but so dangerous, of how hungry I was. ~ Claire Messud

Now, when you shit, as you first sit down, you're not fully in the experience yet. You are not yet a shitting person. You're transitioning from a person about to shit to a person who is shitting. You don't whip out your smartphone or a newspaper right away. It takes a minute to get the first shit out of the way and get in the zone and get comfortable. Once you reach that moment, that's when it gets really nice. It's a powerful experience, shitting. There's something magical about it, profound even. I think God made humans shit in the way we do because it brings us back down to earth and gives us humility. I don't care who you are, we all shit the same. Beyoncé shits. The pope shits. The Queen of England shits. When we shit we forget our airs and our graces, we forget how famous or how rich we are. All of that goes away. You are never more yourself than when you are taking a shit. You have a moment where you realize "This is me, this is who I am". You can pee without giving it a second thought, but not so with shitting. Have you ever looked in a baby's eyes when it's shitting? It's having a moment of pure self-awareness. ~ Trevor Noah

I think a fair amount about the fact that we're all going to die. It occurs to me at incredibly inopportune moments - I'll be standing in a bar, having managed to get an attractive guy to laugh, and I'll be laughing, too, and maybe dancing a little bit, and then everything goes slo-mo for a second and I'll think: Are these people aware that we're all going to the same place in the end? ~ Lena Dunham

Happiness, it seems to me, consists of two things: first, in being where you belong, and second
and best
in comfortably going through everyday life, that is, having had a good night's sleep and not being hurt by new shoes. ~ Theodor Fontane

When I graduated from college, I moved to New York and started doing improv because I read all about the early 'Saturday Night Live' guys having come through Second City and learning how to improvise, so I wanted to get immediately into that. ~ Andy Daly

Crime reporting was aggressive in Richmond, an old Virginia city of 220,000, which last year was listed by the FBI as having the second-highest homicide rate ~ Patricia Cornwell

If people are like plants, what are the conditions we need to flourish? In the happiness formula from chapter 5, H(appiness) = S(etpoint) + C(onditions) + V(oluntary activities), what exactly is C? The biggest part of C, as I said in chapter 6, is love. No man, woman, or child is an island. We are ultrasocial creatures, and we can't be happy without having friends and secure attachments to other people. The second most important part of C is having and pursuing the right goals, in order to create states of flow and engagement. In the modern world, people can find goals and flow in many settings, but most people find most of their flow at work. ~ Jonathan Haidt

As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved , incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it's like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval. It's just not cricket. Take the example, 'The Highland Terrier is the cutest, and perhaps the best of all dog species.' Sensitive people trained to listen for the second comma (after 'best') find themselves quite stranded by that kind of thing. They feel cheated and giddy. In very bad cases, they fall over. ~ Lynne Truss

We Don't Need to Leave Yet, Do We? Or, Yes We Do

One kind of person when catching a train always wants to allow an hour to cover the ten-block trip to the terminus,
And the other kind looks at them as if they were verminous,
And the second kind says that five minutes is plenty and will even leave one minute over for buying the tickets,
And the first kind looks at them as if they had cerebral rickets.
One kind when theater-bound sups lightly at six and hastens off to the play,
And indeed I know one such person who is so such that it frequently arrives in time for the last act of the matinee,
And the other kind sits down at eight to a meal that is positively sumptuous,
Observing cynically that an eight-thirty curtain never rises till eight-forty, an observation which is less cynical than bumptious.
And what the first kind, sitting uncomfortably in the waiting room while the train is made up in the yards, can never understand,
Is the injustice of the second kind's reaching their scat just as the train moves out, just as they had planned,
And what the second kind cannot understand as they stumble over the first kind's heel just as the footlights flash on at last
Is that the first kind doesn't feel the least bit foolish at having entered the theater before the cast.
Oh, the first kind always wants to start now and the second kind always wants to tarry,
Which wouldn't make any difference, except ~ Ogden Nash

One of the biggest changes for me on a practical level of shooting the film was having a second unit. ~ Duncan Jones

How could the colonists starve in the midst of plenty? One reason was that the English feared leaving Jamestown to fish, because Powhatan's fighters were waiting outside the colony walls. A second reason was that a startlingly large proportion of the colonists were gentlemen, a status defined by not having to perform manual labor. ~ Charles C. Mann

Well, poetry - at least lyric poetry - tries to lead us to relocate ourselves in the self. But everything we want to do these days is an escape from self. People don't want to sit home and think. They want to sit home and watch television. Or they want to go out and have fun. And having fun is not usually meditative. It doesn't have anything to do with reassessing one's experience and finding out who one is or who the other guy is. It has to do with burning energy. When you go to the movies, you're overcome with special effects and monstrous goings-on. Things unfold with a rapidity that's thrilling. You're not given a second to contemplate the previous scene, to meditate on something that's just happened - something else takes its place.

We seem to want instant gratification. Violent movies give you instant gratification. And drugs give you instant gratification. Sporting events give you instant gratification. Prostitutes give you instant gratification. This is what we seem to like. But that which requires effort, that which reveals itself only in the long term, that which demands some learning, patience, or skill - and reading is a skill - there's not enough time for that, it seems. We forget that there is a thrill that attends the slower pleasures, pleasures that become increasingly powerful the more time we spend pursuing them.

SHAWN

Maybe people avoid poetry because it somehow actively makes them nervous or anxious.

STRAND
Mark Strand

Pause one second. And be honest." Thorne held up a finger.
"Are you having a mental breakdown right now? ~ Marissa Meyer

The only problem with him and Henry was they were like Charlie Brown and Lucy. The only difference was once in a while Henry would hold onto the football so Eddie could kick it
not often, but once in a while. Eddie had even thought, when in one of his heroin dazes, that he ought to write Charles Schultz a letter. Dear Mr. Schultz, he would say. You're missing a bet by ALWAYS having Lucy pull the football up at the last second. She ought to hold it down there once in a while. Nothing Charlie Brown could ever predict, you understand.
Sometimes she'd maybe hold it down for him to kick three, even four times in a row, then nothing for a month, then once, and then nothing for three or four days, and then, you know, you get the idea. That would REALLY fuck the kid up, you know? ~ Stephen King

Usually, Marilyn Norton loved the hot weather, but she was having a tough time with it, nine months pregnant, with her due date in two days. She was expecting her second child, another boy, and he was going to be a big one. She could hardly move in the heat, and her ankles and feet were so swollen that all she had been able to get her feet into were rubber flip-flops. She was wearing huge white shorts that were too tight on her now, and a white T-shirt of her husband's that outlined her belly. She had nothing left to wear that still fit, but the baby would arrive soon. She was just glad that she had made it to the first day of school with Billy. He had been nervous about his new school, and she wanted to be there with him. ~ Danielle Steel

The Hammer was a hard man, a smart man too, and he took pride in always having a plan 'b'. For those troubling occasions when plan 'b' didn't work, he would strive to also have a plan 'c' in place. In short, he was the kind of man who always had something up his sleeve besides his funny bone. The pilot, his trusted second man gave him a worried look.
"What do we do now? ~ Christina Engela

New Rule: America must stop bragging it's the greatest country on earth, and start acting like it. I know this is uncomfortable for the "faith over facts" crowd, but the greatness of a country can, to a large degree, be measured. Here are some numbers. Infant mortality rate: America ranks forty-eighth in the world. Overall health: seventy-second. Freedom of the press: forty-fourth. Literacy: fifty-fifth. Do you realize there are twelve-year old kids in this country who can't spell the name of the teacher they're having sex with?

America has done many great things. Making the New World democratic. The Marshall Plan. Curing polio. Beating Hitler. The deep-fried Twinkie. But what have we done for us lately? We're not the freest country. That would be Holland, where you can smoke hash in church and Janet Jackson's nipple is on their flag.

And sadly, we're no longer a country that can get things done. Not big things. Like building a tunnel under Boston, or running a war with competence. We had six years to fix the voting machines; couldn't get that done. The FBI is just now getting e-mail.

Prop 87 out here in California is about lessening our dependence on oil by using alternative fuels, and Bill Clinton comes on at the end of the ad and says, "If Brazil can do it, America can, too!" Since when did America have to buck itself up by saying we could catch up to Brazil? We invented the airplane and the lightbulb, they invented the bikini wax, and now ~ Bill Maher

I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not his only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-and-forty when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him in great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one with which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a tall youth at Eton. My brother was to be his representative and successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making connexions, of course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of an aristocratic position. But intrinsically, he had slight esteem for "those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified himself for forming an independent opinion by reading Potter's Aeschylus, and dipping into Francis's Horace. To this negative view he added a positive one, derived from a recent connexion with mi ~ George Eliot

Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up. I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men - white male corporate society. So why wouldn't a woman want to rebel against that? ~ Kim Gordon

Nature is behaving with us like that elderly rabbi to whom two men went in order to settle a dispute. Having listened to the first, the rabbi says: "You are in the right." The second insists on being heard. The rabbi listens to him and says: "You're also right." Having overheard from the next room, the rabbi's wife then calls out, "But they can't both be in the right!" The rabbi reflects and nods before concluding: "And you're right too." A ~ Carlo Rovelli

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, right field, center field, pitcher's mound -- without having the slightest clue as to how they function in a game. You can talk the talk, but you can't walk the walk. ~ Stanley Fish

She trained the girls in her Girl Scout troop to believe that they could be anything, and she went to lengths to prevent negative stereotypes of their race from shaping their internal views of themselves and other Negroes. It was difficult enough to rise above the silent reminders of Colored signs on the bathroom doors and cafeteria tables. But to be confronted with the prejudice so blatantly, there in that temple to intellectual excellence and rational thought, by something so mundane, so ridiculous, so universal as having to go to the bathroom...In the moment when the white women laughed at her, Mary had been demoted from professional mathematician to a second-class human being, reminded that she was a black girl whose piss wasn't good enough for the white pot. ~ Margot Lee Shetterly

Pressure to me now has become almost part of my life. It doesn't really affect me anymore. People talk about me being under pressure or having pressure of having to come in and be this great player that everyone expects me to be right away. It doesn't really faze me. It's become second nature now. It's almost like it would be weird not to have it. ~ Reggie Bush

There was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war. ~ Gertrude Stein

That much hope had brought Max to his knees.
Apparently if he didn't let himself weep like a little girl to relieve this emotional pressure building inside of him, he was in danger of hitting the ground in a dead faint.
Jules crouched beside him, checking for his pulse. "Are you okay? You're not, like, having a heart attack or a stroke, are you?"
"Fuck you," Max managed, swatting his hand away. "I'm not that old."
"If you really think heart disease is about age, then you definitely need to make an appointment with a cardiologist, like tomorrow - "
"I just . . . tripped," Max said, but when he tried to get up, he found he still hadn't regained his equilibrium. Shit.
"Or maybe you needed to get on your knees to pray," Jules said as Max put his head down and waited for the dizziness to pass. "That excuse sounds a little more believable, if you want to know the truth. 'Hello God? It's me, Max. I know I've been lax in my attention to You over the past forty-mmph years, but if You give me a second chance, I'll make absolutely certain this time around I'll tell Gina just how much I love her. Because withholding that information sure as hell didn't do either of us one bit of good, now did it?'"
"I did what I - " Max stopped himself. To hell with that. "I don't have to explain myself to you."
"That's right, you don't." Jules ignored Max's attempt to push him away, and helped him to his feet. "But you might want to work up some kind of Forgive-Me ~ Suzanne Brockmann

Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that - or enhances and prolongs and deepens
and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation - is worth it to me. [It is] impossible for me to imagine having
my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I loved my second trimester! I didn't feel sick anymore and had more energy. My bloated belly turned into a baby bump, and I definitely looked pregnant. That was a relief because when I was around 4.5 months, you could see people having this inner monologue with themselves, wondering if I ate too much pizza or if I was pregnant. ~ Marisa Miller

Awakening your spiritual self is like having a second childhood with faulty parents, broken bones and proverbial brussel sprouts. ~ Christopher Hawke

And so it was on the second Thursday of September, these five men kissed their spouses and children good-bye and climbed aboard the rented RV for a fun filled weekend of golfing, drinking, taking drugs and having sex with women who were not their wives. ~ Helen Argiro

And I remember as a second or third grader having some autonomy to go to the store if I felt like it, walk home, take my time, kick the can. We were on our own schedule after school, so that was cool. ~ Stone Gossard

So began my love affair with books. Years later, as a college student, I remember having a choice between a few slices of pizza that would have held me over for a day or a copy of On the Road. I bought the book. I would have forgotten what the pizza tasted like, but I still remember Kerouac.
The world was mine for the reading. I traveled with my books. I was there on a tramp steamer in the North Atlantic with the Hardy Boys, piecing together an unsolvable crime. I rode into the Valley of Death with the six hundred and I stood at the graves of Uncas and Cora and listened to the mournful song of the Lenni Linape. Although I braved a frozen death at Valley Forge and felt the spin of a hundred bullets at Shiloh, I was never afraid. I was there as much as you are where you are, right this second. I smelled the gunsmoke and tasted the frost. And it was good to be there. No one could harm me there. No one could punch me, slap me, call me stupid, or pretend I wasn't in the room. The other kids raced through books so they could get the completion stamp on their library card. I didn't care about that stupid completion stamp. I didn't want to race through books. I wanted books to walk slowly through me, stop, and touch my brain and my memory. If a book couldn't do that, it probably wasn't a very good book. Besides, it isn't how much you read, it's what you read.
What I learned from books, from young Ben Franklin's anger at his brother to Anne Frank's longing for the way her ~ John William Tuohy

Jackson blinked again, almost at a loss for words as he ignored the mini Cooper reference, a term the girls loved and had begun calling their offspring. Having four women all entering the second trimester of their pregnancy at the same time was just about killing the brothers. How the hell had he become part of this? He wasn't married to any of them, and yet now he was the peanut butter bearer. Hell. "Four ... four types of peanut butter?" Jackson asked. "Yes. Four. I'm alone in the house with four pregnant women who all want peanut butter of their own choosing. For the love of God, help me." The panic in his brother's voice made Jackson smile. Matt had the pre-daddy jitters. In fact, all his brothers did. ~ Carrie Ann Ryan