All That We Been Through Quotes & Sayings

A Person spends a whole day, five days a week or more, working hard to make money, but few ever think beyond this fact. They live from pay cheque to pay cheque, drifting through life, and only realize too late that what they have been doing was not wise at all.
As individuals it is now time we take charge of our money and plan for it, otherwise it will plan for you. — Neala Okuromade

All right," Malcolm said. "Let's go back to the beginning." He paused, staring at the ceiling. "Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in orbit, spacecraft going to the moon, pendulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of thing. The regular movement of objects. These are described by what are called linear equations, and mathematicians can solve those equations easily. We've been doing it for hundreds of years." "Okay," Gennaro said. "But there is another kind of behavior, which physics handles badly. For example, anything to do with turbulence. Water coming out of a spout. Air moving over an airplane wing. Weather. Blood flowing through the heart. Turbulent events are described by nonlinear equations. They're hard to solve - in fact, they're usually impossible to solve. So physics has never understood this whole class of events. Until about ten years ago. The new theory that describes them is called chaos theory. — Michael Crichton

We're headed for collapse, if you want my opinion, Missy. I can see it in the fallin' off of the quality of vagrants. There was atime you could find real good company in almost any jungle you'd pick, men who could talk, men who'd read a book now and then; and now, what do you find, a lot of dirty little guttersnipes no decent tramp would want to associate with.
Well, it's been that way all through history. — John Dos Passos

Everybody's just been spilling their guts all over records and talking about how hard it is to be an entertainer and how much we get hated on and what we have to go through. But I ain't really got it that bad. I'm just happy to be here. — Sean Combs

BERNSTEIN: "I'll read you the first few paragraphs." (He got as far as the third. Mitchell responded, "JEEEEEEEEESUS" every few words.) MITCHELL: "All that crap, you're putting it in the paper? It's all been denied. Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published. Good Christ! That's the most sickening thing I ever heard." BERNSTEIN: "Sir, I'd like to ask you a few questions about - " MITCHELL: "What time is it?" BERNSTEIN: "Eleven thirty. I'm sorry to call so late." MITCHELL: "Eleven thirty. Eleven thirty when?" BERNSTEIN: "Eleven thirty at night." MITCHELL: "Oh." BERNSTEIN: "The committee has issued a statement about the story, but I'd like to ask you a few questions about the specifics of what the story contains." MITCHELL: "Did the committee tell you to go ahead and publish that story? You fellows got a great ballgame going. As soon as you're through paying Ed Williams* and the rest of those fellows, we're going to do a story on all of you. — Carl Bernstein

There's a phenomenon I call the Helpless Traveler. If you're traveling with someone who's confident, organized, and decisive you become the Helpless Traveler: "Are we there yet?" "My bags are too heavy." "My feet are getting blisters." "This isn't what I ordered." We've all been that person. But if the person you're traveling with is helpless, then you become the one able to decipher train schedules, spend five hours walking on marble museum floors without complaint, order fearlessly from foreign menus, and haggle with crooked cabdrivers. Every person has it in him to be either the Competent Traveler or the Helpless Traveler. Because Joe is so clearheaded and sharp, I've been able to go through life as the Helpless Traveler. Which, now that I think about it, might not be such a good thing. It's a question for Joe. His — Maria Semple

We kissed all the way through the fireworks display. We didn't even notice that there was a fireworks display ... ... I guess because we'd been making fireworks of our own. — Meg Cabot

Through Heaven's Gate and Back speaks to all of us that have been abused as children. Lee Thornton's descriptions of the aftereffects of repeated trauma and a profound Near-Death Experience (NDE) are not only true but explained in a way that the reader can take in. It is rare to find a book so well written that it has both sexual abuse and an NDE under one cover. We definitely will be recommending this book to our patients. — Charles L. Whitfield

When the subject of kids first came up years ago, I'd joked that the only thing I could imagine worse than me as a mother was Clay as a father. I couldn't have been more wrong. Clay was an amazing parents. The guy who couldn't spare a few minutes to hear a mutt's side of the story could listen to his kids talk all day. The guy who couldn't sit still through a brief council meeting could spend hours building Lego castles with his kids. The guy who solved problems with his fists never even raised his voice to his children. And if sometimes Clay was a little too indulgent, a little too slow to discipline, preferring to leave that to me, I was okay with it. He supported and enforced my decisions and we presented a unified front to our children, and that was all that mattered. — Kelley Armstrong

It's not politically correct to say that you love one child more than you love your others. I love all of my kids, period, and they're all your favorites in different ways. But ask any parent who's been through some kind of crisis surrounding a child
a health scare, an academic snarl, an emotional problem
and we will tell you the truth. When something upends the equilibrium
when one child needs you more than the others
that imbalance becomes a black hole. You may never admit it out loud, but the one you love the most is the one who needs you more desperately than his siblings. What we really hope is that each child gets a turn. That we have deep enough reserves to be there for each of them, at different times.
All this goes to hell when two of your children are pitted against each other, and both of them want you on their side. — Jodi Picoult

You know, the day we had dinner in the cafeteria, I almost bailed. Even now, I don't know how I ended up in the chemo room with you. Then we got to talking, and I realized that after all you've been through, you still smiled. Still hoped. Cancer didn't take that away from you. That moment I knew how much better you are than me." I feel the corners of my lips tug upward as the memory envelops me. "And how much I loved seeing you smile. — D. Nichole King

I've spent so much time with my dad traveling and seeing the ground-level change that we've been able to make through philanthropy and trip over trip, time over time, country over country, home after home we've been invited into, given tea, given food that people didn't have to give us, I mean all of these things. — Howard Warren Buffett

Perhaps we should explore some other options before swanning off to Ireland," Dad said, pushing his glasses up. "After all, Sophie, you've been through quite the ordeal."
"I'll nap on the plane. Look, we are dealing with the possibility of an army of demons. I don't know about you guys, but those words are right up there with 'root canal' and 'school on Saturdays' in terms of things that terrify me. Were already three weeks behind. We don't have time to just sit here and explore options or read more books or listen to more half-assed prophecies from this jerk," I said, pointing to Torin. He made a gesture that I think was the old-timey version of flipping me off.
"So, yeah," I continued. "Maybe this is a totally stupid idea. But if there's even a chance one of us can get into the underworld, then we have to take it."
"Okay, I do like you," Finley said, flashing me a grin. — Rachel Hawkins

If I don't get back home to my wife, and if you should see her again, then tell her that I talked of her daily, hourly. You remember. Secondly, I have loved her more than anyone. Thirdly, the short time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have gone through here. — Viktor E. Frankl

Looking at the world through the sunset in your eyes, traveling the train through clear Moroccan skies. Ducks and pigs and chickens call, animal carpet wall to wall, American ladies five-foot tall in blue. Sweeping cobwebs from the edges of my mind, had to get away to see what we could find. Hope the days that lie ahead, bring us back to where they've led, listen not to what's been said to you. Wouldn't you know we're riding on the Marrakesh Express? Wouldn't you know we're riding on the Marrakesh Express, they're taking me to Marrakesh. All aboard the train, all aboard the train ... — Graham Nash

We came through the Ring to stop James Holden from talking to the aliens first. But this is the same man that helped send Eros to Venus instead of letting it destroy the Earth. Why did we assume he'd do a bad job of being the first human the aliens met? And now something has slapped us down, taken all our guns away, but not killed us. This should mean something. Certainly anything this powerful could kill us as easily as it declawed us. But it didn't. Instead of trying to figure out what it means, we're hurting so we call it evil. I feel like we're children who've been punished and we think it's because our parents are mean. — James S.A. Corey

Autumn is the Sabbath of the year; the time to think of all the past: nature's calm twilight before the darkness. It does make all men think at times; even the lightest and the worst. The distant days of our springtime, our faded summer, comes over us like a dream. We sit in the evening of our life in tender musings, and all that has been takes shadowy form again, and passes through the thoughts. — Cunningham Geikie

In my opinion, the best time to be alive is always right now. People are aways whining about how they were born in the wrong century, but they really haven't thought things through. They picture the old castle they wish they could live in, but they don't think about the drafts in the winter or the pitch darkness at night, or all the spiders and the lice. They can't imagine the everyday pain of a life without movies or recorded music or... or... Interet videos about cats. And don't even get me started on women who idealize the past. Do you have any idea what it was like to be a woman even a hundred years ago? Horrible! And a hundred years before that, the situation practically defies description. We might as well have been slaves. Trussed up in hoop skirts and corsets, married off like racehorses. Good riddance to history, I say! — Tommy Wallach

Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children, because stress sculpts the brain to exhibit several antisocial behaviors. Stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes that permanently wire a child's brain to cope with a malevolent world. Through this chain of events, violence and abuse pass from generation to generation as well as from one society to the next. Many world leaders who have been disciplined through anger and cruelty go in to treat their own people abominably, or to bully other nations. As long as we continue to discipline children like this, we will continue to have terrible wars on both the family and the world stage. One very powerful study illustrates the point. Researchers tracked down Germans who, in World War II, risked their own lives by hiding a Jewish person in their house. When interviewed, the researchers found one common feature of all these people. They had all been socialized in ways that respected their personal dignity. — Margot Sunderland

It's like we learn to think something's ugly. Maybe if we're could all stop being taught that only certain things are right or pretty, or that only certain things are the way that everything else should be, you know, I mean physically, then we could start looking at things through fresh eyes. And then we're wouldn't look at things or people in a way that would make them sad or that would exclude them. It might even stop us from constantly trying to change our own body image, and maybe we'd just learn to enjoy what we have, enjoy what great gifts we've been given and revel in them instead of wishing they'd be different. — John C. Horst

It's been a harder book to write for personal reasons too. What gets me most are not the scary scientific studies about melting glaciers, the ones I used to avoid. It's the books I read to my two-year-old. Looking For a Moose is one of his favorites. It's about a bunch of kids that really, really, really want to see a moose. They search high and low - through a forest, a swamp, in brambly bushes and up a mountain, for "a long legged, bulgy nosed, branchy antlered moose." The joke is that there are moose hiding on each page. In the end, the animals all come out of hiding and the ecstatic kids proclaim: "We've never ever seen so many moose! — Naomi Klein

You know, most people in the open-source world who use open-source software don't actually do builds themselves - those people just download the binaries. And so we expect that the big enterprise people will just do that and we will certainly be providing binaries that have been through full industrial-strength QA, that have been through all the conformance testing. — James Gosling

Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught

they're hiding

they're awake in there
dark in the dark
hearing us
but they won't come out
not for love not for time not for fire

even when the dark has worn away
they'll still be there
hiding in the air
multitudes in days to come may walk through them
breathe them
be none the wiser

what script can it be
that they won't unroll
in what language
would I recognize it
would I be able to follow it
to make out the real names
of everything

maybe there aren't
many
it could be that there's only one word
and it's all we need
it's here in this pencil

every pencil in the world
is like this — W.S. Merwin

We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more. — Fred Frith

I started to see human beings as little lonesome, water based, pink meat, life forms pushing air through themselves and making noises that the other little pieces of meat seemed to understand. I was thinking to myself, 'There's five billion people here but we've never been more isolated.' The only result of the aggressive individualism we pursue is that you lose sight of your compassion and we go to bed at night thinking, 'Is this all there is?' because we don't feel fulfilled. — Devin Townsend

The tree doesn't die, nor do I when you cut off a branch or a finger, we both heal so we don't lose all the sap or blood. That to me is total shock. Also that water defies the laws of physics by becoming less dense when frozen. Life really is a miracle and all the things that are been built into us through it. — Bernie Siegel

Jesus reveals a God who comes in search of us, a God who makes room for our freedom, a God who is vulnerable. Above all, Jesus reveals a God who is love. Those raised in a Christian tradition may miss the shock of Jesus' message, but in truth love has never been a normal way of describing what happens between human beings and their God. Not once does the Koran apply the word love to God. Aristotle stated bluntly, "It would be eccentric for anyone to claim that he loved Zeus" - or that Zeus loved a human being, for that matter. In dazzling contrast the Christian Bible affirms, "God is love," and cites love as the main reason Jesus came to earth: "This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. — Philip Yancey

What we call religion is merely organized belief, with its dogmas, rituals, mysteries and superstitions. Each religion has its own sacred book, its mediator, its priests and its ways of threatening and holding people.
Most of us have been conditioned to all this, which is considered religious education; but this conditioning sets man against man, it creates antagonism, not only among the believers, but also against those of other beliefs.
Though all religions assert that they worship God and say that we must love one another, they instill fear through their doctrines of reward and punishment, and through their competitive dogmas they perpetuate suspicion and antagonism. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The deepwood is vanished in these islands
much, indeed, had vanished before history began
but we are still haunted by the idea of it. The deepwood flourishes in our architecture, art and above all in our literature. Unnumbered quests and voyages have taken place through and over the deepwood, and fairy tales and dream-plays have been staged in its glades and copses. Woods have been a place of inbetweenness, somewhere one might slip from one world to another, or one time to a former: in Kipling's story 'Puck of Pook's Hill,' it is by right of 'Oak and Ash and Thorn' that the children are granted their ability to voyage back into English history. — Robert Macfarlane

My husband is my most ruthless critic ... sometimes he will say, 'It's been said better before.' Of course it has. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die. — Madeleine L'Engle

Why is it that it is often easier for us to confess our sins to God than to a brother? God is holy and sinless, He is a just judge of evil and the enemy of all disobedience. But a brother is sinful as we are. He knows from his own experience the dark night of secret sin. Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution ... Who can give us the certainty that, in the confession and the forgiveness of our sins, we are not dealing with ourselves but with the living God? God gives us this certainty through our brother. Our brother breaks the circle of self-deception. A man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I went to a psychiatrist (NBC insisted we all go) and told her I had been through traumatic experiences before and understood that the kidnapping would leave "fingerprints" on me for a while. The key was knowing what to expect. If you get blind drunk, you know you're going to wake up with a hangover. By the same token, I expected post-traumatic stress symptoms - anger, irritability, a sense of isolation - and I experienced those feelings, off and on, for several months. It's like having the monkey on your back again, and being self-aware helps shake him off. — Richard Engel

I received some really bad news. I'm not okay."
A bolt of terror slashed through me. She had some sort of disease, I could tell. She had cancer. I was sure of it. I had a vision of Carol Kingsly in her hospital bed, her limbs withered, her head shaved, looking up at me with sunken eyes. Gad. Looking up at me with the expectation that I would care for her. Me. Somehow now she was my responsibility? We had only been going out for a couple of weeks, I didn't even like her all that much, and still I was on the hook? What were the rules on that? And with whom could I lodge my appeal? — William Lashner

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you - and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something IS missing. That isn't of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille. — Jeanette Winterson

Alexander: "First we will send the frontovik into the streets with guns. When they are dead, we will send me, with a tank, like the one you've been making me. When I'm dead, all the barricades down, all the weapons and tanks gone, they will send you with a rock."
Tania: "And when I'm dead?"
Alexander: "You're the last line of defense. When you're dead, Hitler will march through Leningrad the way he marched through Paris. Do you remember that?"
Tania: "That's not fair the French didn't fight"
Alexander: "The didn't fight Tania, but you will fight. For every street and for every building. And when you lose - — Paullina Simons

Struggling through young adulthood is half the fun, or so I've been told. Except we all know that's bullshit. It wasn't fun at all. It was painful, and now I just wanna go somewhere no one knows me, start the next chapter of my life fresh. But I can't. — Sara Wolf

Everything that we've been through makes me realize that love is about finding the right person in this cold, oppressive world that loves all the wrong things about you. Everything you try to hide, they accept. And I know he accepts me. — Calia Read

You know, I was a nerdy kid going through high school, and then I got to college and that all vanished. I mean, a lot of my good friends - when we were in high school, we would never have been able to hang out together because we were in such different cliques or whatever. Now, who cares? — Brandon Sanderson

This is where we belong, united as one in happiness. It has been a long and difficult journey to where we are today, but through it all, we never lost hope that some day this freedom could be ours again. Hope is the one thing Sinistra could not take from us. Without hope, you are lost. With it, you are never alone... — Krista Bur

We perceive and interpret the outer world through a set of incredibly fine internal receptors. But we are incapable, by ourselves, of grasping or tweezing out any permanent, sharable figment of it. Practically speaking, we ritually verify what is there, and are disposed to call it reality. But, with photographs, we have concrete proof that we have not been hallucinating all our lives. — Max Kozloff

There are hard days to live. And sometimes they will be just a few, and sometimes they will seem endless. And eventually you'll come to understand that we've all been there before - or more than likely are going there now. And maybe that idea will make it easier for you, and maybe it won't. But there will still be hard days to live, and you will still have to find your way through them. — Carew Papritz

I'm no crazier than anyone else. I love life the same as most people - what else have we got that's real? I like to take a good picture; I like to wake up in love; I like to read a good book; I like to travel without many plans; I like a shifting mix of the expected and the unexpected; I like to swim in rivers and oceans; I like to walk; I like to see sunlight coming through trees; I like old cites and snow and live music and all the kooky things I've been doing these last few days. All of it, the good and the bad and the stuff in between. I'm not saying I haven't made mistakes. I'm not saying I haven't been rude or cavalier or predictable. I'm only saying that if you asked me, I'd say, Yeah, I'm too young to die. — Michael Jarvis

The essence of my lyrics is the desire for peace and harmony. That's all anyone has ever wanted. How could it become outdated? ... We are trying to communicate a fulfilled ideal ... I am a reflection of what I sing. Sometimes I have to get serious because the things I've been through are serious ... The way I see it, rock n' roll is folk music. — Robert Plant

My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference. What can I say to a man who asks that? All I can do is try to explain to him why he asks the question. You have looked at us for years as different from you that you may never see us really. You don't understand because you think of us as second-class humans. We have been passive and accommodating through so many years of your insults and delays that you think the way things used to be is normal. When the good-natured, spiritual-singing boys and girls rise up against the white man and demand to be treated like he is, you are bewildered. All we want is what you want, no less and no more. (Chapter 13). — Shirley Chisholm

I didn't simply want children - I probably could have found someone who would have been willing to do the baby thing - I wanted them with her. I longed to see the sparkle of her eyes in the eyes of a child; to have that infectious laugh of hers coming out of a baby's mouth as I tickled them; I wanted to hold a child in my arms and look at it and see her and me, our genes combined to make another human being. When it came to me that that would never happen, I put my fist through the back door. All these little things kept coming to me, all the "I'll nevers", but that was the worst one. I grieved for the children we'd never have almost as much as I'd grieved for her. — Dorothy Koomson

Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion's den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can't get free of them and that's what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I've been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there's a story. And that's what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I'm in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did. — Ray Bradbury

I believe that this way of living, this focus on the present, the daily, the tangible, this intense concentration not on the news headlines but on the flowers growing in your own garden, the children growing in your own home, this way of living has the potential to open up the heavens, to yield a glittering handful of diamonds where a second ago there was coal. This way of living and noticing and building and crafting can crack through the movie sets and soundtracks that keep us waiting for our own life stories to begin, and set us free to observe the lives we have been creating all along without even realizing it. — Shauna Niequist

We think, sometimes, there's not a dragon left. Not one brave knight, not a single princess gliding through secret forests, enchanting deer and butterflies with her smile. What a pleasure to be wrong. Princesses, knights, enchantments and dragons, mystery and adventure ... not only are they here-and-now, they're all that ever lived on earth! Our century, they've changed clothes, of course. Dragons wear government-costumes, today, and failure-suits and disaster-outfits. Society's demons screech, whirl down on us should we lift our eyes from the ground, dare we turn right at corners we've been told to turn left. So crafty have appearances become that princesses and knights can be hidden from each other, can be hidden from themselves. — Richard Bach

One day, I will be a child again. Carved toys will caper and dance from my mind, out across rock I will raise as mountains. Through grasses I will proclaim forests. For too long I have been trapped in this world of measures, proportions and scale. For too long I have known and understood the limits of what is possible, so cruel in rejecting all that can be imagined. In this way, friend, we are each of us not one but two lives, for ever locked in mortal combat, and from all things at hand, we make weapons.' - Hust Henarald — Steven Erikson

Self-hatred is the inevitable byproduct of the culture of narcissism in which we all have been reared. We learn from day one how special and wonderful we are. Or conversely, and perhaps more pervasively, we do not learn this at all and instead are subjected to glorified views of others through the media whom we idealize and envy. At the root of it all are inappropriate expectations about life, about ourselves, and an overvaluation of self that breeds profound isolation. — Melissa Grabau

The soul of us is never confused about why it is here.
It only asks us to wake up and see the breadcrumb clues it has been leaving all along.
It asks us to have courage to face the wounds we have been hiding, allow it to heal them and untangle the heavy, snarled patterns.
Because the soul of us has no doubt whatever that it can and, if we allow it to express fully, can live a life of such power and joy through us that our human selves will be astonished. — Jacob Nordby

I had been so focused on why we were suffering through all these adversities that I had neglected to think about who could get me through them or how God was going to mold our hardships to be for his glory. — Tracie Miles

For I can assure you that we love our country, not for what it was, though it has always been great - not for what it is, though of this we are deeply proud - but for what it someday can, and, through the efforts of us all, someday will be. — John F. Kennedy

When I became Archbishop I set myself three goals for my term of office. Two had to deal with the inner workings of our Anglican (Episcopalian) Church - the ordination of women to the priesthood which our Church approved in 1992 and through which our Church has been wonderfully enriched and blessed; and the other in which I failed to get the Church's backing, the division of the large and sprawling Diocese of Cape Town into smaller episcopal pastoral units. The third goal was the liberation of all our people, black and white, and that we achieved in 1994. — Desmond Tutu

I knew, of course, that I should be well paid for my services, but I would gladly have accepted half the sum I expected if I could have had it that night, for our little treasury was wholly exhausted, and we had not sixpence to purchase a breakfast for the following day. When the great hall door shut upon me, and I found myself on the pavement, with all the luxury and splendour on one side, and I and my desolation on the other, the contrast struck me cruelly, for I too, had been rich, and dwelt in illuminated palaces, and had a train of liveried servants at my command, and sweet music had echoed through my halls. I felt desperate, and drawing my hat over my eyes I began pacing the square, forming wild plans for the relief or escape from my misery. ("The Italian's Story") — Catherine Crowe

Remember: knowing originates on the inside, knowledge on the outside. Certain facts and concepts may change, come into being, disappear, or be replaced, but what it is to be a human being will never really be all that different. Every person to ever live, now and the whole of history, has had a rich and elaborate world of inner experience, but it has mainly been flesh upon the same skeleton. We are all
born, come to terms with the world, and then come to terms with coming to terms with the world, as we go through the stages of puberty, old age, death and
making sense of it all in between. We all live the same process in different ways. Some live it longer than others and some cover more ground. But that's it. — Oli Anderson

but perhaps it will help if we all realize that perhaps all of us have been pests at one time or another to somebody but we never knew it. shit, it's a horrible thought but most probably true and maybe it will help us bear up under the pest. basically, there is no 100 percent man. we are all run through with various madnesses and uglinesses that we ourselves are not aware of but that everybody else is aware of. how ya gonna keep us down on the farm? — Charles Bukowski

I will never again play anything that does not have social significance. We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we are master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we've been through, — Max Roach

All men will die. All men will be called upon to pass through the veil. But only a few, only a few special men, only those who have been worthy to answer a calling from God, are given the honor to die for a cause.
And in this life, in these times, all of us will be called on to make a sacrifice. When, or in what manner that sacrifice may be required, only God knows. All we can do is wait and prepare and pray that when our time comes, we will be ready to complete the task that he gives, so that when it is over, when we have done all we could, we might look to the Lord and say the same words he said : 'I have fought my way through, I have finished the work Thou didst give me to do. — Chris Stewart

Our company has been very forward-thinking about digital technology and the opportunity that it gives us. As we move into a world where we have more and more devices at our disposal, that really means more and more opportunities for the Walt Disney Co. to reach you: through our entertainment, through all of our divisions. — Anne Sweeney

There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice. None of this matters. We're just warming up. — Chuck Palahniuk

The night air was still and damp rising from the mud banks of the creek. Our lives had been determined by the random flow of water through weaknesses in the soil. Where there was water there was humanity. Especially now, with no stable forms of transportation, our villages were all based on the flow of water. From the sides of the mountains we'd traversed just days ago it looked like an open expanse of nothing. From here it looked like an open expanse of nothing. Staring into the void above, it was the same nothing. Staring into my heart was the only form of anything solid and that was suspect at best. — Charles Miske

You can't know that." "But I do," she said. "I can feel it. Goddamn it, you think you're the only one with a voice inside? Samantha Aldovar is in there, and she is out of time. If we back off, they kill her and eat her. And if we take the time to go through channels and go in with SRT and all that, she disappears and she's dead. I know it. She's in there now, Dex. I got such a strong feeling; I've never been more sure about something." It — Jeff Lindsay

Thousand years ago, we all descended from Africans who left the continent. Those ancestors, we will never know their name. We can go back 200 or 300 years and actually populate your family tree with real people who had names and documents. They had customs, characteristics that, unbeknownst to you, you have inherited. Almost through osmosis it has been passed down to you. — Henry Louis Gates

The movie, (X-Men: Days of Future Past), illustrates a spiritual journey that involves going back in time. The Purpose of the journey is to find the core grievance and let it be healed. When the grievance is healed in Forgiveness, all future scenarios of conflict and destruction are also healed. It is not that they have been prevented in time; it is that we have come to the realization that there was no time in which they could have existed. In the Happy Dream, everything is resolved. It becomes harmonious and then disappears.
Wolverine is the agent strong enough to go back through time and ignite the mission of forgiveness. We can think of ourselves this way as well. We can imagine that our future self, or our higher Self, is orchestrating this whole thing for our awakening. We are just perceiving it in time, where we perceive ourselves to be. There is great love and compassion coming from the higher Self, the future self. — David Hoffmeister

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born
the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. — Aldous Huxley

Through this same man and me hath all this war been wrought, and the death of the most noblest knights of the world; for through our love that we have loved together is my most noble lord slain. — Thomas Malory

We all have a " someone " who we carry in our hearts sometimes for an entire lifetime. That one that just doesn't fully remove itself from your journey, reminded at coffee shops through scent and character of a stranger, or a song that you once shared. Years can go by without a thought and then one day you are reminded and it all comes crashing back. The one that could have been, the one that you never knew exactly how to say goodbye to. The one you wish to meet first in another life. — Nikki Rowe

The only contact we could have with the void was through this little the void had produced as quintessence of its own emptiness; the only image we had of the void was our own poor universe. All the void we would ever know was there, in the relativity of what is, for even the void had been no more than a relative void,a void secretly shot with veins and temptations to be something, given that in a moment of crisis at its own nothingness it had been able to give rise to the universe. — Italo Calvino

We thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren't, when we never have. We've just been moving along with time. We said, there's another second gone, there's another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it. — Clifford D. Simak

It is evident that it is the belief of Christian people in this country and in all other enlightened portions of the world that as a nation, we have passed through a severe ordeal - that severe judgments have been poured out upon us on account of the manner in which a poor, oppressed race was treated in this country. — Hiram Rhodes Revels

Money, after all, is an abstract artifact, like language - merely symbolized by the paper or coin or whatever. If you can fully grasp its abstractedness, especially in the computer age, it becomes quite clear that no group can monopolize this abstraction, except through a series of swindle. If the usurers had been bolder, they might have monopolized language as well as currency, and people would be saying we can't write more books because we don't have enough words, the way they now say we can't build starships, because we don't have enough money. — Robert Anton Wilson

We began to build our castles in the air, hoping sooner or later they'd carry us off. New days came like clockwork without becoming tomorrows. We slept less and less, dipped in darkness through the daytime and heated by burning light in the endless evening. And only when we finally got up, threw on our clothes and walked away, did we realize that we had all been gone for years already. — Kristopher Jansma

Besides, they say, when we eat something, what really happens is this. Our failing health starts fighting off the attacks of hunger, using the food as an ally. Gradually it begins to prevail, and, in this very process of winning back its normal strength, experiences the sense of enjoyment which we find so refreshing. Now, if health enjoys the actual battle, why wouldn't it also enjoy the victory? Or are we to suppose that when it has finally managed to regain its former vigour - the one thing that it has been fighting for all this time - it promptly falls into a coma, and fails to notice or take advantage of its success? As for the idea that one isn't conscious of health except through its opposite, they say that's quite untrue. Everyone's perfectly aware of feeling well, unless he's asleep or actually feeling ill. Even the most insensitive and apathetic sort of person will admit that it's delightful to be healthy - and what is delight, but a synonym for pleasure? — Thomas More

I've often said the most difficult things I have to say to people through humour. I can very quickly put someone in their place with it. But we all walk away unscathed because there's been some funnies around it, and I'll usually make sure that it comes back at me. — Dawn French

For me, the entire journey of Lost has been walking that fine line between discovering Sawyer's humanity and, yet, keeping his edge of anger and destructiveness. He's been through every situation possible, emotionally and physically. Sometimes, it's been scary to get in touch with his growth, especially his relationship with Juliet. I really thought the audience might reject the softer side of Sawyer we saw in that. As for what will happen with him and Kate, all I can say is they have a love that is undeniable, but maybe it must be denied. — Josh Holloway

When one begins to concentrate, the dropping of a pin will seem like a thunderbolt going through the brain. As the organs get finer, the perceptions get finer. These are the stages through which we have to pass, and all those who persevere will succeed. Give up all argumentation and other distractions. Is there anything in dry intellectual jargon? It only throws the mind off its balance and disturbs it. Things of subtler planes have to be realised. Will talking do that? So give up all vain talk. Read only those books which have been written by persons who have had realisation. — Swami Vivekananda

Let us recognize that a large fraction of our suffering and that of our fellow human beings is brought about by what we do to one another. It is humankind, not God, that had invented knives, arrows, guns, bombs, and all manner of other instruments of torture used through the ages. The tragedy of the young child killed by a drunk driver, of the innocent young man dying on the battlefield, or of the young girl cut down by a stray bullet in a crime-ridden section of a modern city can hardly be blamed on God. After all, we have somehow been given free will, the ability to do as we please. We use this ability frequently to disobey the Moral Law. And when we do so, we shouldn't then blame God for the consequences. — Francis S. Collins

Catherine," said the Marquess, placing one hand on Cath's shoulder and one on his wife's. "We know you've been through some . . . difficult things recently."

Anger, hot and throbbing, blurred in her vision.

"But we want you to be sure . . . absolutely sure this is what you want." His eyes turned wary beneath his bushy eyebrows. "We want you to be happy. That's all we've ever wanted. Is this what's going to make you happy?"

Cath held his gaze, feeling the puncture of Raven's talons on her shoulder, the weight of the rubies around her throat, the itch of her petticoat on her thighs.

"How different everything could have been," she said, "if you had thought to ask me that before."

She shrugged his arm away and pushed between them. She didn't look back. — Marissa Meyer

I wake on the fiction couch deeply hungover, my head cracking, with Rachel telling me to get up. She's holding my eyelids open like she used to do in high school when we'd stayed up all night talking and then slept through the morning alarm. 'Get. Up. Henry.'

'What time is it? I ask, batting off her hands.

'It's eleven. The shop's been open for an hour. There are customers asking for books I can't find. George is yelling at a guy called Martin Gamble who's here to help me create the database. And as a separate issue, Amy's waiting in the reading garden.'

'Amy's here?' I sit up and mess my hair around. 'How do I look?'

'I decline to answer on the grounds that technically you're my boss and I don't want to start my new job by insulting you.'

'Thank you,' I say. 'I appreciate that. — Cath Crowley

Eritrean people are strong and caring. And despite all that we had been through we were brimming with optimism. Our country was on the verge of huge change. — Abeba Habtu

The way that identity has been commercialised through movies and TV, and now through social networking, means we're all sort of working to a script, a collective idea of what needs to happen next. — Linda Papadopoulos

Another way to speak of the anxiety is in terms of the gap between information and knowledge. A barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to know. Knowledge, in turn, does not guarantee enlightenment or wisdom. (Eliot said that, too: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?") It is an ancient observation, but one that seemed to bear restating when information became plentiful - particularly in a world where all bits are created equal and information is divorced from meaning. The humanist and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford, for example, restated it in 1970: "Unfortunately, 'information retrieving,' however swift, is no substitute for discovering by direct personal inspection knowledge whose very existence one had possibly never been aware of, and following it at one's own pace through the further ramification of relevant literature." He begged for a return to "moral self-discipline. — James Gleick

The Beauty of It If all I have is Now, where will I look for Joy? Without hope for the future, without hope that things will change, with no hope of finding what's been lost, and no hope of restoring the past, with only the risk to crack open all that has hardened about me, what will I do with what I have? At first, this might seem scary or sad, but as a tired swimmer comes ashore surprised to find pearls washing through his legs, I lift my tired head again and again to find all I need is right where I am. But being human, I stray and dream of lives other than my own, and soon I am busy wanting something else, somewhere else, someone else; busy imagining something just out of reach to strive for. It leads me to say if you are unhappy or in pain, nothing will remove these surfaces. But acceptance and a strong heart will crack them like a shell, exposing a softness that has always been, exposing a soft thing waiting to take form. It glows. I think it is the one spirit we all share. — Mark Nepo

Battered by shifing currents and a cold, unrelenting wind, we sailed past deserted islands crowded with pines and a ghost tree growing staight out of the water, its gaunt trunk and scrawny branches raised heavenward like an outcast pleading for his life. Now, having reached the north shore, we were doggedly searching for the hidden rivulet that would take us into The Peak. We were trapped in muddy water barbed with grasses and covered with thick green algae, which broke apart in clumps, then, after we'd edged through, resealed, erasing all signs of our passing.

The wind had dissipated - strange, as it'd been so turbulent minutes ago out on the lake. Dense trees surrounded us, packed like hordes of stranded prisoners. There wasn't a single bird, not a scuttle through the branches, not a cry - as if everything alive had fled. — Marisha Pessl

So you don't think I'm crazy because I see patterns all around me?" Airiana asked, drawing her knees up to rest her chin on top of them.
"No, I think you're perfectly sane," Blythe said. "A little mixed up, but that's to be expected given what you've been through."
"Let's not go that far," Lissa teased. "She's got it in her head that we're all going to find ourselves with a Prakenskii man in our laps."
Lexi nearly spewed her tea across the room. "Don't say that. Good grief, Lissa. This is Sea Haven. You can't put something like that out into the universe and not expect repercussions."
"It wasn't me," Lissa denied, holding up both hands. "Airiana said it first, and I told her the exact same thing."

-Airiana, Blythe, Lissa, & Lexi — Christine Feehan

Diamonds are held under tons and tons of pressure, extremely high temperatures of fire and shuffled under shifting of tectonic plates, for a long, long time! Yet when they come out from there and are put on display for their beauty; does anybody stop to evaluate the diamond based upon all the shit it's been through and say "Remember that disgusting hole it used to be in? I bet it was hell in there!" No, people don't remember where a diamond has come from; they just see the beauty of it now. But it wouldn't have become so beautiful, you know, if not for all of that! So why should we look at other people, or at ourselves and evaluate them/ourselves based upon their/our pasts? Shouldn't we forget that? And only see the beauty that is in front of our eyes? Whatever it was, it made you beautiful! And that is what matters! — C. JoyBell C.

Whole villages of Muslims had been hacked to pieces by drunken Christian youth, and as foreigners, we should have been pulled out by the organization. But the U.S. government supported the Christian tribes, just as the French had all through the colonial days, and to pull us out would have meant admitting that things weren't as stable for their puppet government as the western companies, trading in Ivory Coast for cocoa, rubber, and timber, and selling Coke and cigarettes, wanted to hear. — Tony D'Souza

We are ... the un-proud non-possessors of objects whose chief substance is that of the transient symbol. Our Puritan fear of the love of things turns out to have been groundless after all, for we do not love things or even possess them: they pass through our lives as barium passes through the digestive tract, unassimilated, their function merely to flash signals along the way. — Ralph Caplan

I knew from the beginning that we'd be addicted after all." His amber eyes bore straight through me. "I just didn't know whether we'd be at a better place than we were before."
We are. I don't even have to say the words. He knows the answer too. We're at the best place we've ever been, reaching a stasis together. It's beautiful up here, and even if I fear falling, it's nice to know I've been down that road before. And I can always walk to the top again. — Krista Ritchie

I think the point to be understood is that we're all different. I've never been a fan of theories of acting. I didn't go to drama school, so I was never put through a training that was limited by someone saying, 'This is the way you should act.' — Ian McKellen

I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes. — Jorge Luis Borges

If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more that we all shared the dream of never dying or traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner more unhappy illusion we call normal life. — Scott Spencer

As she bends for a Kleenex in the dark, I am thinking of other girls: the girl I loved who fell in love with a lion
she lost her head over it
we just necked a lot; of the girl who fell in love with the tightrope, got addicted to getting high wired and nothing else was enough; all the beautiful, damaged women who have come through my life and I wonder what would have happened if I'd met them sooner, what they were like before they were so badly wounded. All this time I thought I'd been kissing, but maybe I'm always doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, kissing dead girls in hopes that the heart will start again. Where there's breath, I've heard, there's hope. — Daphne Gottlieb

Digging back through the events of the past, I found that there have been all sorts of people who had a greater effect on us than our own fathers. Perhaps an adult that we wanted to become like, or someone with such a strong presence that even now, they remain in our hearts - someone who might be referred to as a "father of choice." — Mamoru Hosoda

There is only one optimist. He has been here since man has been on this earth, and that is man himself. If we hadn't had such a magnificent optimism to carry us through all these things, we wouldn't be here. We have survived it on our optimism. — Edward Steichen

If you are engaging rationality, you are already engaging a place that makes you unavailable. Only when I recognize that inspiration has announced itself to my availability will I then say I need to use my mind to calculate exposure, my emotions to position myself and arrange a configuration of shapes that need to come into being, my body to put it all in place because we have been given a message and it has come through inspiration through being available.' — Paul Caponigro

This is why it is not true that culture can be, even temporarily, suspended in order to make way for a new culture. Man's unbroken testimony as to his suffering and his nobility cannot be suspended; the act of breathing cannot be suspended. There is no culture without legacy, and we cannot and must not reject anything of ours, the legacy of the West. Whatever the works of the future may be, they will bear the same secret, made up of courage and freedom, nourished by the daring of thousands of artists of all times and all nations. Yes, when modern tyranny shows us that, even when confined to his calling, the artist is a public enemy, it is right. But in this way tyranny pays its respects, through the artist, to an image of man that nothing has ever been able to crush. My conclusion will be simple. It will consist of saying, in the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history: Let us rejoice. — Albert Camus

The theory of behavior is useful to the life of man only as the index is useful to him who goes through it before reading the book itself; when he has read it, all that he has learned is the subject matter. Such is the moral teaching that we receive from the discourses, the precepts, and the stories we are treated to by those who bring us up. We listen to it all attentively; but when we have an opportunity to profit by the various advice we have been given, we become possessed by a desire to see if the thing will turn out to be what we have been told it will; we do it, and we are punished by repentance. What recompenses us a little is that in such moments we consider ourselves wise and hence entitled to teach others. Those whom we teach do exactly as we did, from which it follows that the world always stands still or goes from bad to worse. — Giacomo Casanova

Actually, all fear is born of the imagination, which means the danger we fear doesn't need to be rational or even real to be potent. Like my fear of snakes. When I was eighteen I drove my car off the highway into a ditch because there was a snake on the road. It didn't matter that the snake couldn't have bitten me through the car. It didn't matter that the snake probably wasn't even poisonous or might have even already been dead. It didn't even matter than swerving off the road at fifty miles per hour posed a much greater danger than the snake I was frightened of. Fear doesn't listen to reason. It takes its own counsel. — Richard Paul Evans