“So much of dealing with a disease is waiting. Waiting for appointments, for tests, for "procedures." And waiting, more broadly, for it--for the thing itself, for the other shoe to drop. Except in the waiting you keep forgetting that "it" will really happen--it's more like a threat, an anxiety: Will my love love me forever?”
Source: The Long Goodbye
“Chase looked like a drowning man without a life preserver, and by the look in his eyes, he was going under for the third time.
“I knew you would be like the waters of the South Pacific Ocean.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I liken people to different bodies of water,” he quickly explained.
“You what?”
“Each ocean has a different personality,” he said to clarify. “The Pacific Ocean is warmer and inviting, but the color is muddied in places. The Arctic Ocean is cold and very uninviting, one might even say that it is not very appealing, but it’s full of life. Then there is the South Pacific Ocean, warm, inviting, and crystal clear. It has this purity to it. Why, the coloring of the water is some of the brightest blue I’ve ever seen in my entire life. There are even places that you can see thirty meters down.”
Source: A Compromising Position
“To be in a long-term state of limbo, not knowing the outcome or length of time waiting, is utterly, shatteringly exhausting.”
Source: Those Who Wait: Finding God in Disappointment, Doubt and Delay
“If I had a tumor, then I'd be dead before the year was out, and if I were dead, then there'd be nothing left, no second chances, no leap-year parties, and this waiting for the right time would have been for nothing. I will have died having lived the wrong life. No, not lived: waited.”
Source: Enigma Variations
“There's honest work to be done, Johnny," whispered Griss. "The world is full of work, waiting for you.”
Source: Tess of the Road
“It is undignified to inject yourself with hormones designed to slow or enhance ovarian production. It is undignified to have your ovaries monitored by transvaginal ultrasound; to be sedated so that your eggs can be aspirated into a needle; to have your husband emerge sheepishly from a locked room with the “sample” that will be combined with your eggs under supervision of an embryologist. The grainy photo they hand you on transfer day, of your eight-celled embryo (which does not look remotely like a baby), is undignified, and so is all the waiting and despairing that follows.”
Source: The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood
“Every waiting season in my life has left its mark on me. I have memories, scars. And honestly? I don’t mind the scars anymore. They are part of me now; I wouldn’t recognize myself without them.”
Source: When God Says "Wait": Navigating Life's Detours and Delays Without Losing Your Faith, Your Friends, or Your Mind
“The man who waits to know everything is the man who never does anything.”
“On Not Finding You at Home
Usually you appear at the front door
when you hear my steps on the gravel,
but today the door was closed,
not a wisp of pale smoke from the chimney.
I peered into a window
but there was nothing but a table with a comb,
some yellow flowers in a glass of water
and dark shadows in the corners of the room.
I stood for a while under the big tree
and listened to the wind and the birds,
your wind and your birds,
your dark green woods beyong the clearing.
This is not what it is like to be you,
I realized after a few of your magnificent clouds
flew over the rooftop.
It is just me thinking about being you.
And before I headed back down the hill,
I walked in a circle around your house,
making an invisible line
which you would have to cross before dark.”
Source: The Trouble With Poetry - And Other Poems
“I always hate this part," Ariel said softly beside Molly. "This moment on the cusp of greater things. The waiting is almost worse than being in the midst of it all.”
Source: Terra Nova