Wendy Wasserstein Quotes

The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets.

In the ardor of pursuit men soon forget the goal from which they start.

You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.

Do today's duty, fight to-day's temptation; and do not weaken and distract yourself by looking forward to things which you cannot see, and could not understand if you saw them.

You gazed at the moon and fell in the gutter.

There is a burden of care in getting riches; fear in keeping them; temptation in using them; guilt in abusing them; sorrow in losing them; and a burden of account at last to be given concerning them.

I have switched on this modern laptop machine. And I have told myself that I must resist the temptation to start playing solitaire upon it.

At some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you'll look back down and see that you floated away, too.

While forbidden fruit is said to taste sweeter, it usually spoils faster.

The lustful glances thrown his way made me wish he wasn’t such a damned bowl of eye candy." - Cat re: Bones

Sometimes Holly seemed like she wasn't paying attention, and other times she was gone when I went looking for her. That was when she went to a part of heaven we didn't share. I missed her then, but it was and odd sort of missing because by then I knew the meaning of forever. I could not have what I wanted most: Mr. Harvey dead and me living. Heaven wasn't perfect. But I came to believe that if I watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on Earth.

the whole way down, I was only thinking one thing . . . L E N A

The best way to bury your pain is to help others, and to lose yourself in that.

There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.

Lust is a captivity of the reason and an enraging of the passions. It hinders business and distracts counsel. It sins against the body and weakens the soul.

Losing focus is another way that founders get off track.

It's hard, when you're up to your armpits in alligators, to remember you came here to drain the swamp.

My most persistent memory of stand - up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future: the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next. Enjoyment while performing was rare - enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford.

A man marries one woman to escape from many others, and then chases many others to forget he's married to one.

In grasping at uncertainties we lost that which is certain.

Woman was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy.

The one who loses his head no longer cares about his hair.

Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber thinking it was zucchini. That's the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.

It is common to overlook what is near by keeping the eye fixed on something remote.

Blessed be the man whose work drives him. Something must drive men; and if it is wholesome industry, they have no time for a thousand torments and temptations.