Top 100 At Bay Quotes
#1. Poor England! thou art a devoted deer,
Beset with every ill but that of fear.
The nations hunt; all mock thee for a prey;
They swarm around thee, and thou stand'st at bay.
William Cowper
#2. But it wasn't long before the old familiar discontent started creeping up on me. I suppose it was always there, somewhere in the background. All I've done, my whole life, is keep it temporarily at bay.
Sara Gruen
#3. I thought I'd won the match when she'd fallen into my arms, heart and all. The truth was, she'd beaten me. Snatched my soul and shattered all the lies I'd built around me to keep the pain of connecting at bay.
Lyla Payne
#4. The universe is an infinite opportunity creation machine. In every instant, the possibility of greater possibility is programmed into the nature of things. Love creates the conduit through which new possibility enters our experience, and lovelessness keeps it at bay.
Marianne Williamson
#5. I'm 57, I can't look like a 30-year-old. You try to hold age at bay, but there comes a point when you just have to give up gracefully.
Elton John
#6. You can keep difficult emotions at bay for a very long time, even for a lifetime but for most of us, at some point in our lives, they will demand to be heard.
Sally Brampton
#7. Happiness just wasn't part of the job description back then. You tried to find a helpmate to keep the cold wind and dogs at bay. Happiness just wasn't part of the equation. Survival was.
Robin Green
#8. ... believing sarcasm and rude remarks kept the monsters at bay. They didn't.
Louise Penny
#9. mobs will be kept at bay, since they cannot climb ladders! Save
Malcolm Becker
#10. Just to keep the bad dreams at bay, she took a swig out of a bottle that smelled of apples and happy brain-death.
Terry Pratchett
#11. Do I want to, can I face my own pain alone now? Shock keeps horror at bay. Hands off. Distanced by mist and pride and drink and friends and necessities like food, babies, fires ... So the pain sits still, crouching, heavy, occupying all my inside, always, all the time, whatever my outside does.
Elizabeth Smart
#12. The unique thing about Margaret Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone. Among its many moods I especially cherish the chin commanding, the chin in doubt, and the chin at bay.
Kenneth Tynan
#13. Our happiness is made up of our needs being fulfilled, our fears being kept at bay in a life made up of days, which are based on pursuing what is most important to us.
Malti Bhojwani
#14. Scarecrow queen. Nothing but a dupe, alone in a field, hoping to keep the crows at bay.
Melinda Salisbury
#15. Thin ribbons of fear snake bluely through you like a system of rivers. We need a cloudburst or soothing landscape fast, to still this panic. Maybe a field of dracaena, or a vast stand of sugar pines - generous, gum-yielding trees - to fill our minds with vegetable wonder and keep dread at bay.
Amy Gerstler
#17. whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you.
Anne Lamott
#18. It takes so much energy to keep things at bay.
Sue Monk Kidd
#19. Light had a way of keeping the monsters of my imagination at bay.
Becca Fitzpatrick
#20. I have found that it is the small everyday deed of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love." ~ Gandalf (J. R. R. Tolkein ~ The Hobbit)
J.R.R. Tolkien
#21. Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.
Voltaire
#22. A weight settles on my shoulders. I knew, of course, that Uriah might never wake up. But the hope that kept the grief at bay is dwindling, slipping away with each word she speaks.
Veronica Roth
#23. Do not press an enemy at bay. Prince Fu Ch'ai said: Wild beasts, when at bay, fight desperately. How much more is this true of men! If they know there is no alternative, they will fight to the death.
Sun Tzu
#24. Whenever she was unhappy she felt herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her.
Edith Wharton
#25. It was raining heavily outside my window, April showers, keeping the current Michigan spring gloom at bay.
Justin Bog
#26. The lord of light made the sun and moon and stars to light our day, and gave us fire to keep the night at bay.
George R R Martin
#27. I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.
William Kentridge
#28. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
David Foster Wallace
#29. It's how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and devouring us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep.
Stephen King
#30. I am heavy in his arms, and I feel safe there, but I am lost, and I need constantly to be shoring up the wall that holds my emotions at bay, or I will feel something too great to contain.
John Darnielle
#31. Maybe love was superstition, a prayer we said to keep the truth of loneliness at bay.
Leigh Bardugo
#32. As the sun shines I will make hay
To keep failure at bay
For there remaineth a pay
For my honest toil each day.
Ogwo David Emenike
#33. It was the final, explosive demonstration of summer, the line in the sand, a desperate attempt to hold fall forever at bay. But autumn nibbled the blue sky with its teeth, tore off chunks of the sun, smudged out that heavy veil of meat-smelling smoke.
Lauren Oliver
#34. It kept him alive, he was certain; even more, it kept his darkest of his demons at bay.
Lara Adrian
#35. He kept the outside world at bay by keeping the inside world at hand.
Mitch Albom
#36. Held at bay by the hate of others, preoccupied with his own feelings, he was continuously at war with reality.
Richard Wright
#37. Though slow to quarrel, and for sport killing nothing that lived, they were doughty at bay, and at need could still handle arms.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#38. Gwydion stood as a wolf at bay, his green eyes glittering, his teeth bared.
Lloyd Alexander
#39. Abbey: Did you speak to me in a different language? When I was in the hospital?
Caspian: Something to keep the nightmares at bay. To let you know I was there. Tu sei una stella ... la mia stella. It means 'You're a star. My star.
Jessica Verday
#40. Fame, or notoriety, whichever that special noise may be called when the world like a hound 'gives tongue' and announces that the quarry in some form of genius is at bay, is apt to increase its clamor in proportion to the aloofness of the pursued animal ...
Marie Corelli
#41. You might tell yourself that candor is the foundation of a relationship, but even that would be untrue. You are far more likely to lie to yourself, or your loved one, if you think it will keep the pain at bay.
Jodi Picoult
#42. It was important, Dumbledore said, to fight, and fight again, and keep fighting, for only then could evil be kept at bay, though never quite eradicated ...
J.K. Rowling
#43. The wound-tight, travel-light Obama has a distaste for the adversarial and the random. But if you stick too rigidly to a 'No Drama' rule in the White House, you risk keeping reality at bay. Presidencies are always about crisis management.
Maureen Dowd
#44. When my father was vigorous and lucid, (my mother) regarded medicine as her wily ally in a lifelong campaign to keep old age, sickness, and death at bay. Now ally and foe exchanged masks. Medicine looked more like the enemy, and death the friend. (p. 184)
Katy Butler
#45. Writing a check was easily done, and easily done with. It allows us to do "charity" while keeping at bay the inner tug that urges us to give more of ourselves and our time, rather than our possessions.
Joseph Langford
#46. Somehow, miraculously, they forced themselves, told themselves they were going to live. They wrote themselves new lives. Fictions, perhaps, but what did it matter? They had kept the chaos at bay. They had managed to stop cursing the darkness. They'd lit a torch.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#47. All those vitamins aren't to keep death at bay, they're to keep deterioration at bay.
Jeanne Moreau
#48. To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The "better life" she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one.
Toni Morrison
#49. Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
William Styron
#50. I mean he's a very famous director ... they're not going to put their ... and he's very tough, he doesn't like interference at all, so he kept them at bay.
Ronald Harwood
#51. Do not press an enemy at bay.
Sun Tzu
#52. One's style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.
Alexander Theroux
#53. Conversely, beware the man who does nothing but ask you questions about yourself and offers no information about himself. Not only is he keeping you at bay, he is probably not listening to your answers.
Merrill Markoe
#54. She's my dream catcher. She keeps my nightmares at bay.
E.L. James
#55. I suppose there's an anger in all of us. Some hidden rage that you keep at bay.
Dominic Cooper
#56. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933 ... Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.
Charles Krauthammer
#57. Give a Paris woman at bay four-and-twenty hours, and she will overthrow a ministry.
Honore De Balzac
#58. Keeps the Flare at bay because the virus thrives in your brain. Eats at it, destroys it. If there's not a lot of activity, the virus weakens.
James Dashner
#59. No great advancement has ever been kept at bay because of ideology, nor greed. Eventually progress moves us forward.
Mark Ruffalo
#60. His mate is the light that keeps that darkness at bay. She fills the hole that has been growing ever larger in his soul. When the bond is completed between mates, their very souls merge and the male will be able to leash the darker part of his nature and at last be at peace with his wolf.
Quinn Loftis
#61. No one but another painter could know the delicacy required to balance the complexities, to keep reality at bay in order to remain in the innermost center of his work.
Susan Vreeland
#62. Tull stopped laughing and stared into Loken's face. His blue eyes were terribly cold and hard. 'Kaos is the damnation of all mankind, Loken. Kaos will outlive us and dance on our ashes. All we can do, all we can strive for, is to recognise its menace and keep it at bay, for as long as we persist.
Dan Abnett
#63. Mercifully, I was at that age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay. I could not have made it through those evenings otherwise.
William Styron
#64. Unhappy people do the oddest, most terrible things, just trying to keep despair at bay. All you have to do is accept them ... go around them ... take evasive action.
Geraldine McCaughrean
#65. People assume that somehow fame and wealth will keep mortality at bay.
Moby
#66. You were the one, I wanted most to stay.
But time could not be kept at bay.
The more it goes, the more it's gone, the more it takes away.
Lang Leav
#67. LIV. There is no 'one cap fits all' solution for keeping stress at bay. You have to choose individually.
Moazzam Shaikh
#68. We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this
through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#69. The Gould viewed female Wardens in the same light as demonic minions and the Ebola virus
such things might exist in the world, but virtue and good hygiene would probably be enough to keep them at bay.
Christine Warren
#70. Swirling in a squirrel cage of perpetual motion, the head-committee meets, argues, votes out the guidance available from emotions, and successfully keeps serenity at bay and chaos close at hand.
David W. Earle
#71. My message is - keep moving. If you do, you'll keep arthritis at bay.
Donna Mills
#72. My mother insured that a life of petty facts and dutiful farming was kept at bay by her passionate intensity, which nurtured the essential dreaminess of his nature
Josephine Hart
#73. Writing keeps death at bay. Every book I write is a triumph over death ... If we did not know we'd die, we'd wander around and sleep like cats.
Ray Bradbury
#75. Soundless echoes - no voice,
Sadness doth keep thee at bay,
Stagnation rises as ebb & flow,
Nothing alters,
Unless you choose to break away.
Truth Devour
#76. No matter what that makes elastic - sharply, intellectually and sincerely, keep at bay it as noxious waste.
Swami Vivekananda
#77. Some of these walls had been of my own making; my rebellion, my resistance; my arrogance, my need for control. Some had been built around me by the misfortunes of life; my loneliness; my orphaned heart; my fear of rejection. I had kept God at bay, and cheated myself of the warmth of His mercy.
Tessa Afshar
#79. With care, and skill, and cunning art, She parried Time's malicious dart, And kept the years at bay, Till passion entered in her heart and aged her in a day!
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
#80. Oh yes, I kept all of the abominations at bay while Kaliel played with his favorite sheep behind the bushes.
Christopher Moore
#81. And that sometimes, just sometimes, it is the light reflected off of polished steel that can keep the shadows at bay.
Jason L. McWhirter
#82. When our priorities are out of order, we lose power. It takes personal revelation every day to help us prioritize and keep at bay the influences of the world that would draw us from what we are to do.
Julie B. Beck
#83. The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.
Rebecca Solnit
#84. I have this terrible dark side to my personality, which playing tennis keeps at bay.
Monica Seles
#85. I write four books a year. I'm very fortunate that I write quickly; around 3,500 words a day. Being strict about delineating my writing time and personal life, as well as keeping distractions at bay, is the only way I can accomplish this.
Alexander McCall Smith
#86. The woman who keeps her emotions at bay can find the way.
Orest Stelmach
#87. But a person can only keep reality - and anger - at bay for so long before the truth comes back again.
Veronica Roth
#88. The Stag at Bay with the mentality of a fox at large.
Bernard Levin
#89. He understood then that all his exploits as a reporter, the feats that had won him such recognition and fame, were merely an attempt to keep his most ancient fears at bay, a stratagem for taking refuge behind a lens to test whether reality was more tolerable from that perspective.
Isabel Allende
#90. Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?
Paulo Coelho
#91. I am caught like a beast at bay. Somewhere are people, freedom, light, But all I hear is the baying of the pack, There is no way out for me.
Boris Pasternak
#92. Did she have to be so downright fetching in her refusal?
Taking Annie back, he struck a sterner pose in order to keep all comers at bay.
Laura Frantz
#93. She had discovered that the most effective method of keeping the fear at bay was to fantasize about something that gave her a feeling of strength. She closed her eyes and conjured up the smell of gasoline.
Stieg Larsson
#94. I ended my Twitter account a week after I got on the show. I felt like, "This is not a good tool for me to keep my narcissism at bay," so I cut it off.
Mireille Enos
#95. Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#96. Pain is such a personal thing. I wear mine like a cloak of protection, keeping people at bay. Max just casually removes it from my shoulders and drops it to the ground. If that weren't intimidating enough, he lays it out like a picnic blanket, waiting for me to take a seat and join him.
Maggi Myers
#97. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay ... small acts of kindness and love.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#98. Me, I was already jaded and tarnished, skeptical that a fantasy world could keep reality at bay.
Jodi Picoult
#99. My creativity, no matter how poor, is for me a far better guide than all the knowledge with which my head has been crammed. In the night of Power, its glimmer keeps the enemy forces at bay.
Raoul Vaneigem
#100. If politi-cians - however well-intentioned - were barred from planning, manipulating, or directing the affairs of their fellow citizens, then extremists of Right and Left alike would be kept at bay.
Tony Judt
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