Sureness Quotes

He reached for her and she went willingly into his arms. He kissed her deeply, feeling the waves of shivers washing through her. Even as his mouth claimed hers, his hands were everywhere. Tracing the length of her spine, squeezing the curve of her butt, sliding up her hips to her waist.

There was a confidence to Duncan, a sureness that allowed her to relax. His strength made her want to surrender, because being around him was inherently safe.
<...>'Don't make me hit you. I have a great jab."

"You have a sad excuse for a jab. It would be like being attacked by a butterfly.'

"I was calm and rational," she told him.

"You were a girl. Admit it."

"I could hit you right now."

"You could and no one would notice. Especially not me. ~ Susan Mallery

A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Second base is anything but magic. If it's anything at all, it's speed, sureness with your hands and lots of hard work. ~ Nellie Fox

For the first time in his life, Roland found himself hating his own childhood. He wished for the size and calluses and sureness of age. ~ Stephen King

But there was about her the mysterious authority of beauty, a sureness in the carriage of the head, the movement of the eyes, which, without being in the least theatrical, struck him as highly trained and full of a conscious power. (Newland Archer of Countess Olenska) ~ Edith Wharton

Father Paul was at the start of life. His glassy convictions needed protection. They waited patiently until he too, succumbed to the unbearable unevenness of God's will, the sureness of his grace, the darkness of his mercy. ~ Kathleen Tessaro

For Longing

Blessed be the longing that brought you here
And quickens your soul with wonder.

May you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire
That disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.

May you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease
To discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.

May the forms of your belonging - in love, creativity, and friendship -
Be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.

May the one you long for long for you.

May your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.

May a secret Providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.

May your mind inhabit life with the sureness with which your body inhabits the world.

May your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.

May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.

May you know the urgency with which God longs for you. ~ John O'Donohue

Be not held back by fear's insane insistence that sureness lies in doubt. I am not doubtful, but certain. The miracle is always there. I will see them in the light. ~ Helen Shucman

There's more fun in hunting with the handicap of the bow than there is in hunting with the sureness of the gun. ~ Fred Bear

It struck me as odd that it had taken me so long to reach a feeling of sureness that there was something in me that would get on with the job of living without my continual tampering. I suppose I did not really reach it until I had discovered how to sink down beneath the level of chattering thoughts and simply feel what it meant to be alive. ~ Marion Milner

I know about sureness,' said Didactylos. 'I remember, before I was blind, I went to Omnia once. And in your Citadel I saw a crowd stoning a man to death in a pit. Ever seen that?'
'It has to be done,' Brutha mumbled. 'So the soul can be shriven and-'
'Don't know about the soul. Never been that kind of philosopher,' said Didactylos. 'All I know is, it was a horrible sight.'
'The state of the body is not-'
'Oh, I'm not talking about the poor bugger in the pit,' said the philosopher. 'I'm talking about the people throwing the stones. They were sure all right. They were sure it wasn't them in the pit. You could see it in their faces. So glad it wan't them in the pit that they were throwing just as hard as they could. ~ Terry Pratchett

Sureness is something like a neck brace, which we clamp around our lives, hoping to somehow protect ourselves from the frightening, constant whiplash of change. Sadly, the brace doesn't always hold. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The people I knew, even the people I loved, did not always get things right, and they accumulated acts and omissions that lessened their sense of sureness. ~ Kadiatou Diallo

There are two kinds of geniuses. The characteristic of the one is roaring, but the lightning is meagre and rarely strikes; the other kind is characterized by reflection by which it constrains itself or restrains the roaring. But the lightning is all the more intense; with the speed and sureness of lightning it hits the selected particular points - and is fatal. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

The truly educated man is not a man who knows a bit of everything, not even a man who knows all the details of all subjects (if such a thing were possible). The whole man in fact may have little detailed knowledge of facts and theories ... but he will be truly in touch with the centre. He will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his own view on the meaning and purpose of life. He may not be able to explain these matters in words, but the conduct of his life will show a certain sureness of touch which stems from his inner clarity. ~ E.F. Schumacher

She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others' eyes. She does not dare to be herself. ~ Anais Nin

The detective thinks he is investigating a murder or a missing girl. But truly he is investigating something else altogether, something he cannot grasp hold of directly. Satisfaction will be rare. Uncertainty will be your natural state. Sureness will always elude you. The detective will always circle around what he wants, never seeing it whole. We do not go on despite this. We go on because of it. ~ Sara Gran

What was sureness and certainty? I used to hold on to certainty like a light inside me, hoping it would chase out the dark unknown. But certainty was a phantom strung together on hopes. It would lead you astray at the first chance. ~ Roshani Chokshi

...There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there's
still a sureness in you, where there's a seamlessness in you, and where
there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of
prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind
of sanctuary. ~ John O’Donohue

I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know. ~ Gloria Steinem

I give to my friends the assurance that if they will recast their ideas and attitudes about the relative importance of the spiritual to the material, and bring themselves to participate in the mighty cause of establishing God's kingdom in the earth, they will find a satisfaction, a sureness of purpose, a peace and contentment, surpassing anything they have ever known. ~ Stephen L. Richards

On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves. ~ Iain M. Banks

True love asks no question of the heart. It knows with surety. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

The uniform of the gladdest malt is its sureness. ~ Kenneth Koch

Her eyes burnt like the blue in a gas flame. They were ferocious things. For some moments her eyes were all he was aware of. And they were looking at him. But there was no look in them. It was as if she were just drinking him up. Was she assessing him? Judging him? He didn't know. Maybe it was this sureness that made him both resentful and unsure. ~ Richard Flanagan

It had come to me not in a sudden epiphany but with a gradual sureness, a sense of meaning like a sense of place. When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. In some persons this sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme, and we then get the formidable neurasthenic and psychasthenic conditions, with life grown into one tissue of impossibilities, that so many medical books describe.

Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in co-ordination, in power of inhibition and co ntro l, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject - but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us, it is only an inveterate habit - the habit of inferiority to our full self - that is bad. ~ Colin Wilson

I was passive by nature. I had always been. Arguing felt unnatural and uncomfortable. I was always agreeing even when I didn't really, instinctively looking for ways to forfeit power, to become more dependent, to be taken care of. I realized how intensely Icecap reminded me of Jacob. They were similar, both diligent and harsh in their judgments - and my big brother's sureness had always comforted me.

But as I ran on sore legs to keep up with Icecap, my tendency toward silence stressed me. ~ Aspen Matis

Self-confidence isn't - as we might first imagine - the conviction that we're bound to succeed at everything we try. The belief that we can't fail is an irrational delusion bound eventually to lead to disaster. Genuine confidence is precisely the opposite: the inner sureness that we'll be OK even if we do fail quite a few times and that our sense of self-worth can remain more or less intact, even if we don't exactly pull off what we're aiming at. To the confident person, the stakes are manageable - which leaves them free to have a go at all the many interesting things in the world where success cannot be guaranteed. ~ Alain De Botton

ego promenades, flounces, pushes in unwanted places, trips, stands on others, whereas a sense of destiny grounds - you just do what you do ~ Jay Woodman

He's cocky but wounded, charming but lonely, with the sureness of a wealthy man and the desperation of a pauper. I can't figure him out, but one thing is certain. Daren is not as tough or undamaged as he lets on. ~ Chelsea Fine

We commend a horse for his strength, and sureness of foot, and not for his rich caparisons; a greyhound for his share of heels, not for his fine collar; a hawk for her wing, not for her jesses and bells. Why, in like manner, do we not value a man for what is properly his own? He has a great train, a beautiful palace, so much credit, so many thousand pounds a year, and all these are about him, but not in him. ~ Michel De Montaigne

When I was a child her sureness enraged me (regardless of the argument involved). It was a sureness that revealed - at least to my eyes - how, behind the bravado, she was vulnerable and hesitent, whereas I wanted her to be invincible. Consequently, I would contradict whatever it was she was being so certain about, in the hope we might discover something else, which we could question together with a shared confidence. Yet what happened, in fact, was that my counterattacks, made her more frail than she usually was, and the two of us would be drawn, helpless, into a malestrom of perdition and lamentation, silently crying out for an angel to come and save us. On no such occasion did an angel come. ~ John Berger

Asbjørn had a nose, that was his great talent, I had never met anyone with such sureness of taste as him, but what use was it, part from being the hub student life revolved around? The essence of a nose is judgment, to judge you have to stand outside, and that is not where creativity takes place. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

How could anything be the same? The red of blood lay over the market road in slick pools mingled with a yellow spread of dal someone must have brought in anticipation of a picnic after the parade, and there were flies on it, left behind odd slippers, and a sad pair of broken spectacles, even a tooth. It was rather like the government warning about safety that appeared in the cinema before the movie with the image of a man cycling to work, a poor man but with a wife who loved him, and she had sent his lunch with him in a tiffin container; then came a blowing of horns and small, desperate cycle tinkle, and a messy blur clearing into the silent still image of a spread of food mingled with blood. Those mismatched colors, domesticity shuffled with death, sureness running into the unexpected, kindness replaced by the image of violence, always made the cook feel like throwing up and weeping both together. ~ Kiran Desai

As we watch the process in which the soul becomes thought or speech, we notice that many a time we ease ourselves into convenient clichés that have little of the new insight in them. Once more we are trapped by habits that are the dunghills upon which the creeds feed. It takes vigilance and humble courage to make acts of faith. After all, where faith is weak, there is an abundance of beliefs. With this in mind we may be more humble about our tradition and our sureness, yet also a bit more proud of the holy process in our inner being that keeps teaching and guiding us. ~ Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

Trust, is the stone thrown into the sea, sinking deep in all its murkiness, unable to see what it once lived and believed to be a promise. ~ Anthony Liccione

He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air's buoyancy even for an hour: the trad was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird. ~ Jonathan Franzen

She was after all the kind of woman who would make a man easily uproot his life, the kind who, because she did not expect or ask for certainty, made a certain kind of sureness become possible. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie