Dorothy Canfield Fisher Quotes

Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back in the shell.

There's no getting blood out of a turnip.

People can do great things. However, there are some things they just CAN'T do. I, for instance, have not been able to transform myself into a Popsicle, despite years of effort.

Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

Trying to sneak a fastball past Hank Aaron is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster.

There just isn't any pleasing some people. The trick is to stop trying.

And what 's impossible can't be, And never, never comes to pass.

If the skies fall, one may hope to catch larks.

We were trying to achieve miracles and reduce the world to what it cannot be.

You can't win some people over.

Part of what motivated my writing was anger. I was angry that the daily misery of doctors, nurses, and patients was being trivialised into soap opera. We were made to feel bad because we were not perfect like our television counterparts. We were resentful that our patients did not get better as quickly as they did on telly - or at all.

There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.

If you want reality to be different than it is, you might as well try to teach a cat to bark.

It is in vain to hope to guard against events too mighty for human foresight or precaution, and it would be idle to object to a government because it could not perform impossibilities.

It is, we believe, Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump Can extinguish hell.

To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.

It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon.

the biggest tragedy of life is the utter impossibility to change what you have done

To expect an impossibility is madness.

Collin Singleton could no more stay cool than a blue whale could stay skinny or Bangladesh could stay rich

And never since harvests were ripened, / Or laborers born, / Have men gathered figs of the thistle, / Or grapes of the thorn!

It is the act of a madman to pursue impossibilities .

All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put the past together again. So let's remember: Don't try to saw sawdust.

Vicarious living is only slightly less impossible than vicarious eating.