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# Weekend Words: Delay
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-delay/
- Published: 2017-05-21T13:30:31.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:27:16.000Z
- Description: "We will never be an advanced civilization as long as rain showers can delay the launching of a space rocket."
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Art, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:23 (2016, 2017, part 2)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2017/05/delay.jpg)

Gerolamo Induno, “Waiting for the Train” (1871), oil on canvas, 110 x 93 cm, private collection (image via Web Gallery of Art)

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](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/nyregion/cuomo-deblasio-mta-subway.html?%5Fr=0&ref=hyperallergic.com) 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**