In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, patience often feels like a virtue that's slipping through our fingers. Waiting—be it for big moments or small—is an inevitable part of the human experience. Embracing those moments with grace and understanding can transform periods of anticipation into opportunities for reflection and growth. In this post, we’ve curated a collection of 42 insightful quotes that delve into the art and essence of waiting. These words of wisdom remind us that waiting, while challenging, is often the precursor to some of life's most rewarding experiences. Join us as we explore the profound insights and gentle reminders encapsulated in these timeless quotes about waiting.
1. “...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.” - Marguerite Duras
2. “Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.” - Sharon Creech
3. “He thought of the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she had contentedly pursued her own lone quite path-for him.~ Stephen speaking of Rachael” - Charles Dickens
4. “I have always, essentially, been waiting. Waiting to become something else, waiting to be that person I always thought I was on the verge of becoming, waiting for that life I thought I would have. In my head, I was always one step away. In high school, I was biding my time until I could become the college version of myself, the one my mind could see so clearly. In college, the post-college “adult” person was always looming in front of me, smarter, stronger, more organized. Then the married person, then the person I’d become when we have kids. For twenty years, literally, I have waited to become the thin version of myself, because that’s when life will really begin.And through all that waiting, here I am. My life is passing, day by day, and I am waiting for it to start. I am waiting for that time, that person, that event when my life will finally begin.I love movies about “The Big Moment” – the game or the performance or the wedding day or the record deal, the stories that split time with that key event, and everything is reframed, before it and after it, because it has changed everything. I have always wanted this movie-worthy event, something that will change everything and grab me out of this waiting game into the whirlwind in front of me. I cry and cry at these movies, because I am still waiting for my own big moment. I had visions of life as an adventure, a thing to be celebrated and experienced, but all I was doing was going to work and coming home, and that wasn’t what it looked like in the movies.John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” For me, life is what was happening while I was busy waiting for my big moment. I was ready for it and believed that the rest of my life would fade into the background, and that my big moment would carry me through life like a lifeboat.The Big Moment, unfortunately, is an urban myth. Some people have them, in a sense, when they win the Heisman or become the next American Idol. But even that football player or that singer is living a life made up of more than that one moment. Life is a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous, glowing pearl. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments are so small, and so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies.But this is what I’m finding, in glimpses and flashes: this is it. This is it, in the best possible way. That thing I’m waiting for, that adventure, that move-score-worthy experience unfolding gracefully. This is it. Normal, daily life ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, in our houses and apartments, in our beds and at our dinner tables, in our dreams and prayers and fights and secrets – this pedestrian life is the most precious thing any of use will ever experience.” - Shauna Niequist
5. “It's hard being left behind. (...) It's hard to be the one who stays.” - Audrey Niffenegger
6. “He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly's unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is, they ache until they atrophy.” - Harold Brodkey
7. “I never knew I never knew that everything was falling through That everyone I knew was waiting on a cue To turn and run when all I needed was the truth But that's how it's got to be It's coming down to nothing more than apathy I'd rather run the other way than stay and see The smoke and who's still standing when it clears Everyone knows I'm in Over my headOver my head With eight seconds left in overtime She's on your mindShe's on your mind Let's rearrange I wish you were a stranger I could disengage Just say that we agree and then never change Soften a bit until we all just get along But that's disregard Find another friend and you discard As you lose the argument in a cable car Hanging above as the canyon comes between Everyone knows I'm in Over my headOver my head With eight seconds left in overtime She's on your mindShe's on your mind Everyone knows I'm in Over my headOver my head With eight seconds left in overtime She's on your mind She's on your ... And suddenly I become a part of your past I'm becoming the part that don't last I'm losing you and its effortless Without a sound we lose sight of the ground In the throw around Never thought that you wanted to bring it down I won't let it go down till we torch it ourselves And everyone knows I'm in Over my headOver my head With eight seconds left in overtime She's on your mindShe's on your mind Everyone knows She's on your mind Everyone knows I'm in over my head I'm in over my head I'm over my... Everyone knows I'm in Over my headOver my head With eight seconds left in overtime She's on your mindShe's on your mind.” - The Fray
8. “You know, I wouldn’t have done this a month ago. I wouldn’t have done it then. Then I was avoiding. Now I’m just waiting. Things happen to me. They do. They have to go ahead and happen. You watch – you wait… Things still happen here and something is waiting to happen to me. I can tell. Recently my life feels like a bloodcurdling joke. Recently my life has taken on *form* Something is waiting. I am waiting. Soon, it will stop waiting – any day now. Awful things can happen any time. This is the awful thing.” - Martin Amis
9. “There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison” - Jane Austen
10. “We will wait. We will wait till all is made righteous (glorious) according to the word of God.” - John Piper
11. “The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn't ring. Or the phone.” - Douglas Adams
12. “And oh, heaven - the crowded playhouse, the stench of perfume upon heated bodies, the silly laughter and the clatter, the party in the Royal box - the King himself present - the impatient crowd in the cheap seats stamping and shouting for the play to begin while they threw orange peel on to the stage.” - Daphne du Maurier
13. “There are words in the soul of a newborn baby, wanting and waiting to be written.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]
14. “We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.” - Voltaire
15. “I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able to honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray: Thy will be done.” - Elisabeth Elliot
16. “But, someone, please give me—who is born again but still so much in need of being born anew—give me the details of how to live in the waiting cocoon before the forever begins?” - Ann Voskamp
17. “I don't care how wonderful heaven is, I won't be content waiting thirty years for you.” - Jason F. Wright
18. “pak sabar adalah suami bu menanti.mr patient is the husband of mrs waiting.” - Toba Beta
19. “Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, ifhe is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast.” - Hermann Hesse
20. “Fear is the glue that keeps you stuck. Faith is the solvent that sets you free.” - Shannon L. Alder
21. “Time doesn't heal all wounds, only distance can lessen the sting of them.” - Shannon Alder
22. “He tried to tell me week after week to accept things as they were and move on with my life. But if there was one man who had put his life on hold to wait for something or someone, it was him.” - Cecelia Ahern
23. “When I was little and running on the race track at school, I always stopped and waited for all the other kids so we could run together even though I knew (and everybody else knew) that I could run much faster than all of them! I pretended to read slowly so I could "wait" for everyone else who couldn't read as fast as I could! When my friends were short I pretended that I was short too and if my friend was sad I pretended to be unhappy. I could go on and on about all the ways I have limited myself, my whole life, by "waiting" for people. And the only thing that I've ever received in return is people thinking that they are faster than me, people thinking that they can make me feel bad about myself just because I let them and people thinking that I have to do whatever they say I should do. My mother used to teach me "Cinderella is a perfect example to be" but I have learned that Cinderella can go fuck herself, I'm not waiting for anybody, anymore! I'm going to run as fast as I can, fly as high as I can, I am going to soar and if you want you can come with me! But I'm not waiting for you anymore.” - C. JoyBell C.
24. “I had to decide what I was going to do, and what I was going to be.I was standing there, waiting for someone to do something , till I realised the person I was waiting for was myself.” - Markus Zusak
25. “The street to my left was backed up with traffic and I watched the people waiting patiently in the cars. There was almost always a man and a women, staring straight ahead, not talking. It was, finally, for everyone, a matter of waiting. You waited and you waited- for the hospital, the doctor, the plumber, the madhouse, the jail, papa death himself. First the signal red, then the signal was green. The citizens of the world ate food and watched t.v. and worried about their jobs or lack of the same, while they waited.” - Charles Bukowski
26. “The day drags along, you make thousands of plans, you imagine every possible conversation, you promise to change your behavior in certain ways–and you feel more and more anxious until your loved one arrives. But by then, you don't know what to say. The hours of waiting have been transformed into tension, the tension has become fear, and the fear makes you embarrassed about showing affection.” - Paulo Coelho
27. “I sat taller, to suppress my impatience. It was infuriating, this waiting. I was thirty-seven years old. And like a child, an infant, really, I was at the mercy of others. Hour after hour of my life was spent waiting.” - Rosie Sultan
28. “Deep under our feet the Earth holds its molten breath, while the bones of countless generations watch us and wait.” - Isaac Marion
29. “There’s another story I know. This one doesn’t have any swords or visions. This one is about a boy who found a girl during a terrible time.” “How did it turn out?” “I don’t know, but I do know the boy doesn’t regret it. Not a minute. No matter how it turns out. Because he’s been waiting for this girl from the time she was born, and if it takes another thousand years to meet her again, he’d wait again. Whatever it takes.” - Priya Ardis
30. “Instead,she's as stillas a leaf-littered pond,dark water evaporating,waiting desperately for rain.” - Emma Cameron
31. “You don't get everything all at once. You wait.” - Elizabeth Berg
32. “Waiting does not exist in the experience of those who recognize the presence of love wherever they are.” - Alan Cohen
33. “Patience is learned through waiting” - E'yen A. Gardner
34. “The night is still waiting.” - Dejan Stojanovic
35. “Se è tardi a trovarmi, insisti, se non ci sono in un posto, cerca in un altro, perché io son fermo da qualche parte ad aspettare te.” - Walt Whitman
36. “Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.” - Ian McEwan
37. “Tides do what tides do–they turn.” - Derek Landy
38. “Knowing someone isn't coming backdoesn't mean you ever stop waiting” - Toby Barlow
39. “I kissed him hard. The few people in the bar must have been thinking that all they were seeing was just a kiss. They didn't know that this kiss stood for my whole life - and his life, as well. The life of anyone who has waited, dreamed, and searched for their true path.The moment of that kiss contained every happy moment I had ever lived.” - Paulo Coelho
40. “I thought I loved him when he went away; I love him now in another degree: he is more my own. [ . . . ] Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered--not uttered till; when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some!” - Charlotte Brontë
41. “How can we who are so weak in ourselves, so inferior in power to the enemies confronting us, bear up under our trials which are so numerous, so protracted, so crushing? We could not, and therefore Divine grace has provided for us an all-sufficient Helper. Without His aid we had long since succumbed, mastered by our trials. Hope looks forward to the Glory to come; in the weary interval of waiting, the Spirit supports our poor hearts and keeps grace alive within us.” - A. W. Pink
42. “Remember it is your choice; you can either wait for someone or end someone’s waiting.” - M.F. Moonzajer
