By Fits And Starts Quotes

#1. At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.

Marcel Proust

#2. Sometimes growing pains are by fits and starts.

Anne Northup

#3. Deadlines help me, but my muse hates them. My muse functions in fits and starts, and tends to take very long vacations. Deadlines are like a hot poker to his ass. They force us both to sit down and write, which is what it takes to do this.

Alistair Cross

#4. My clarinet sounded like an apoplectic yak. For the brief days I blew the trumpet, a hostile-sounding pig snorted along in jerky fits and starts with the rest of the irritated band.

Karen Marie Moning

#5. The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#6. Revolution is man's normal activity, and if he is wise he will grade it slowly so that it may be almost imperceptible - otherwise it will jerk in fits and starts and cause discomfort ...

Freya Stark

#7. Many a real genius is lost in the fictitious character of the Gentleman. I am the most inconsistent, changeable being so full of fits and starts.

Thomas Gainsborough

#8. Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.

Walker Percy

#9. It was one of those conversations that moved in fits and starts. The heavy stuff had been thrown into the open and they were trying to pick up the pieces, gently, carefully, wary of the exposed edges.

K.B. Spangler

#10. We are so prone to expect to become good Christians by some sudden experience that lifts us all at once to higher ground without the gradual climb. We forget that we are to "grow in grace" and that normal growth is not a matter of fits and starts.

Vance Havner

#11. Writing is a funny thing. It's not like you're working on a schedule. It comes in fits and starts.

Daphne Guinness

#12. I do 100 shows a year, but I do it in fits and starts, as opposed to going on a long run.

Bryan Adams

#13. Great men are necessary for our life, in order that the movement of world history can free itself sporadically, by fits and starts, from obsolete ways of living and inconsequential talk.

Jacob Burckhardt

#14. Outside the rain finally began to fall, surging in fits and starts. "I love the way it rains here," he told her. "It reminds me that some forces of nature can never be entirely subdued. They are eternal, which is a far better thing to be than immortal.

Neal Shusterman

#15. When you snatch happiness in little bits, fits and starts, and lose it, like me, you become coarse, little by little, you become hateful.

Sarah Ruhl

#16. It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id.

Gilles Deleuze

#17. Time was something that moved in fits and starts for Magnus, dissipating like mist or dragging like chains, but when Alec was here, Magnus's time seemed to fall into an easy rhythm with Alec's, like two heartbeats falling into sync.

Cassandra Clare

#18. I don't find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don't think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life.

John Ashbery

#19. Could man be drunk for ever With liquor, love, or fights, Lief should I rouse at morning And lief lie down of nights. But men at whiles are sober And think by fits and starts, And if they think, they fasten Their hands upon their hearts.

A.E. Housman