You can't sweep other people off their feet, if you can't be swept off your own.

I try to remember, as I hear about friends getting engaged, that it's not about the ring and it's not about the wedding. It's a grave thing, getting married. And it's easy to get swept up in the wrong things.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

A light wind swept over the corn, and all nature laughed in the sunshine.

As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive.

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a fanatical craze for physical fitness swept through Britain. Millions of men and women took up gymnastics, body building, and other physical exercises. Such a thing had never happened before, and it was given a name - Physical Culture.

I was one of those goofy kids whose year narrowed down to focus on Christmas from about September on. I guess I was like Ralphie in 'A Christmas Story,' in that I would get swept up into the anticipation of the holiday, watching the lights go up, hearing the songs in the stores, getting special Christmas issues of comics and all that.

I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley, and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring.

I used to have seven dogs; now I have a more manageable four. I was in Cornwall, and one dog got swept away downstream, so my cousin dived in to get it, then her dog dived in. So I jumped in to rescue hers. Those dogs are my calm. That's how I cope with the business - I get the sanity on my woodland dog walks, being a tomboy.

I started running around my 30th birthday. I wanted to lose weight; I didn't anticipate the serenity. Being in motion, suddenly my body was busy and so my head could work out some issues I had swept under a carpet of wine and cheese. Good therapy, that's a good run.

I'm such an avid magazine reader - music, art, beauty magazines - and I found that food and restaurants were pouring into everything I cared about. Whether it was the pop-up concept, or some mysterious mini-mall restaurant, I got swept up in the sexy romance of the food movement.

Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, look like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.

You can be doing great for months, maybe even years, and then boom, something happens, something triggers an episode. Then your life spirals into one big tornado of emotions that has swept you up right out from under yourself, and you lose control of everything, and you just spin around and around inside a dark, twisty, cloud, while everything flies out of control.

"How many of us are swept away by what I have come to call an 'active laziness'?

It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.

There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory-the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements-the sun, the water against the swimmer's chest, the vague quivering pink which one sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of being swept away by a river or by sleep. These second degree objects can be combined with others; using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer. The fact that no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxically enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them.

Perhaps swimming was dancing under the water, he thought. To swim under lily pads seeing their green slender stalks wavering as you passed, to swim under upraised logs past schools of sunfish and bluegills, to swim through reed beds past wriggling water snakes and miniature turtles, to swim in small lakes, big lakes, Lake Michigan, to swim in small farm ponds, creeks, rivers, giant rivers where one was swept along easefully by the current, to swim naked alone at night when you were nineteen and so alone you felt like you were choking every waking moment, having left home for reasons more hormonal than rational; reasons having to do with the abstraction of the future and one's questionable place in the world of the future, an absurdity not the less harsh for being so widespread.

You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn't that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena.

When we first met, I didn't want to get involved with anyone. I didn't have the time or energy, and I wasn't sure that I was ready for it. But you were so good to me, and I got swept up in that. And little by little, I found myself falling in love with you.

It was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world...on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.

"So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days, you can hear their chorus rushing past: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon'tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglass-I'veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme?.

You can't sweep other people off their feet if you can't be swept off your own.

I try to remember as I hear about friends getting engaged that it's not about the ring and it's not about the wedding. It's a grave thing getting married. And it's easy to get swept up in the wrong things.