Weekend Words: Delay
"We will never be an advanced civilization as long as rain showers can delay the launching of a space rocket."
Delays in New York City’s troubled subway system have increased by 150 percent since 2012, with 70,000 per month compared with 28,000 per month. In an interview with The New York Times, the authority’s interim executive director, Veronique Hakim, stated that “the agency was committed to improving subway service. ‘We feel it,’ she said of the growing frustration. ‘We know it. We understand it.'”
An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for months or years. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.
—Evelle J. Younger
In me is no delay; with thee to go
Is to stay here; without thee here to stay
Is to go hence unwilling; thou to me
Art all things under Heaven, all places thou,
Who for my willful crime art banished hence.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost, Eve speaking to Adam
What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter.
Present mirth hath present laughter.
What’s to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty.
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
—William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Fool’s Song
Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done.
—Aaron Burr
He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay.
—Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Delay in vengeance delivers a heavier blow.
—John Ford
At thirty, man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;
At fifty chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;
In all the magnanimity of thought
Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.
—Edward Young, “Night Thoughts”
Be not impatient in delay,
But wait as one who understands;
When spirit rises and commands,
The gods are ready to obey.
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
—C. Northcote Parkinson
One dignity delays for all—
One mitred Afternoon—
None can avoid this purple—
None evade this Crown!
—Emily Dickinson, XCVIII
I came into the world under the sign of Saturn ― the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
―Walter Benjamin, Aesthetics and Politics
We will never be an advanced civilization as long as rain showers can delay the launching of a space rocket.
—George Carlin
And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.
—Exodus 32:1 (KJV)
To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay right or justice.
—Magna Carta
