All Used Up Quotes & Sayings

Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life. The threat of being outdoors surfaced frequently in those days. Every possibility of excess was curtailed with it. If somebody ate too much, he could end up outdoors. If somebody used too much coal, he could end up outdoors. People could gamble themselves outdoors, drink themselves outdoors. Sometimes mothers put their sons outdoors, and when that happened, regardless of what the son had done, all sympathy was with him. He was outdoors, and his own flesh had done it. To be put outdoors by a landlord was one thing - unfortunate, but an aspect of life over which you had no control, since you could not control your income. But to be slack enough to put oneself outdoors, or heartless enough to put one's own kin outdoors - that was criminal. — Toni Morrison

To the question of writing at all we have sometimes been counselled to forget it, or rather the writing of books. What is required, we are told, is plays and films. Books are out of date! The book is dead, long live television! One question which is not even raised let alone considered is: Who will write the drama and film scripts when the generation that can read and write has been used up? — Chinua Achebe

I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead. — Abraham Maslow

I just hope I don't have to explain all the times I've used His name in vain when I get up there. — Bob Hope

I used to take Sharpies and draw on my pillowcases, and then go to sleep on them and wake up with red marker from the drool all on my face. — Kid Cudi

If I may, I'd like to take a moment to praise Mark Zuckerberg's parents for not procreating sooner. Praise be to all that is holy that Facebook didn't exist when I was that age and the Internet then was but a Usenet group for Star Trek fans. I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have grown up when cameras used actual film because the only thing that stood between infamy and me was the clerk who developed photos at Walgreens. Thank God for him. — Jen Lancaster

When my sister and I were very young, my father used to tell us fairy stories that he'd made up. My mother was always telling him that he should write them down, but he would say, 'Well, they've all been done before. There are so many blooming books in the world - why should I write another one?' — Nicolas Roeg

The wife of a junior officer cooped up in a horrible canvas partition in steerage for five months wrote:
"I had enjoyed much peace there in the absence of every comfort, even of such as are now enjoyed in jail. I used to say that there were four privations in my situation - fire, water, earth and air. No fire to warm oneself on the coldest day, no water to drink but what was tainted, no earth to set the foot on, and scarcely any air to breathe. Yet, with all these miserable circumstances, we spent many a happy hour by candlelight in that wretched cabin whilst I sewed and he read the Bible to me. — Stephen Taylor

Growing up in Dumfries, I got no sun - I spent all my time in my room making records. When I came to America, it made me recognise the benefits of sunlight. Oh, and I also got a good haircut. I used to have a terrible haircut. — Calvin Harris

Prusis told me that the fluke's raging in Moscow, and there's nothing to bury people in. All the material's been used up. So I decided to come out and set things straight.'
Ostap, who had been listening curiously to the entire conversation, stepped in. 'Listen, pops. It's Paris where the flu is raging.'
'In Paris?'
'Well, yes. So go to Paris. You'll rake it in there! It's true that you'll have a few difficulties with the visa, but don't get down about it, pops. If Briand takes a shine to you, your life won't be half-bad: you'll be set up as personal coffin-maker to the municipality of Paris. — Ilya Ilf

For me the poem and the poetry open mic isn't about competition and it never will be. Honestly? It's wrong. The open mic is about 1 poet, one fellow human being up on a stage or behind a podium sharing their work regardless of what form or style they bring to it. In other words? The guy with the low slam score is more than likely a far better poet-writer than the guy who actually won. But who are you? I ? Or really anyone else to judge them? The Poetry Slam has become an overgrown, over used monopoly on American literature and poetry and is now over utilized by the academic & public school establishments. And over the years has sadly become the "McDonalds Of Poetry". We can only hope that the same old stale atmosphere of it all eventually becomes or evolves into something new that translates to and from the written page and that gives new poets with different styles & authentic voices a chance to share their work too. — R.M. Engelhardt

You know," he said, "now that I've got used to the idea, I think I'd rather have it this way. We've all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you're never ready, because you don't know when it's coming. Well, now we do know, and there's nothing to be done about it. I kind of like that. I kind of like the thought that I'll be fit and well up till the end of August and then - home. I'd rather have it that way than go on as a sick manfrom when I'm seventy to when I'm ninety. — Nevil Shute

Sansa sat with her hands folded in her lap, watching with a strange fascination. She had never seen a man die before. She ought to be crying too, she thought, but the tears would not come. Perhaps she had used up all her tears for Lady and Bran. It would be different if it had been Jory or Ser Rodrik or Father, she told herself. The young man in the blue cloak was nothing to her, some stranger from the Vale of Arryn whose name she had forgotten as soon as she heard it. And now the world would forget his name too, Sansa realized; there would be no songs sung for him. That was sad. — George R R Martin

When you're young, no one cares who your parents are, although Mum would arrive to pick me up in her full hair and make-up and fur, and I used to say, 'Can't you just dress normally, like all the other mums?' I wanted her to blend in more, but I've always been really proud of Mum - as proud as she is of me. — Georgia May Jagger

I was part of that group of kids growing up in the '80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call 'living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,' where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light and destruction was rolling out and would just devour our neighborhood. — Junot Diaz

As a child, I didn't know what they mean by 'to die.' So I grew up in a place where people used to die all the time, but a child is not allowed to see a dead body. When you ask, 'Where is so-and so?' you're told, 'He's gone to another world where we all go to live in the future.' — Emmanuel Jal

There is no "tropical island paradise" I know of which remotely matches up to the fantasy ideal that such a phrase is meant to conjure up, or even to what we find described in holiday brochures. It's natural to put this down to the discrepancy we are all used to finding between what advertisers promise and what the real world delivers. It doesn't surprise us much any more. So it can come as a shock to realise that the world we hear described by travellers of previous centuries (or even previous decades) and biologists of today really did exist. The state it's in now is only the result of what we've done to it, and the mildness of the disappointment we feel when we arrive somewhere and find that it's a bit tatty is only a measure of how far our own expectations have been degraded and how little we understand what we've lost. The people who do understand what we've lost are the ones who are rushing around in a frenzy trying to save the bits that are left. — Douglas Adams

It has started to snow. We all ran out when it began, and played at catching flakes as we used to when we were children. But it was cold, and our boots and gloves and cloaks were soon wet - you feel these things more when you are grown-up. — Natasha Farrant

I used to run away to New York from Baltimore all the time.I would get on the Greyhound bus and tell my parents I was going to some sorority weekend. I'd even make up fake permission slips, come to New York and just ask people on the street if I could stay with them and go see midnight movies. — John Waters

So, you used to come up here, too, and escape all the girl drama?" I said and chuckled when his cheeks turned a little red.
"Nah," he refuted. "It was always these two the girls wanted. The Jacobsons are hot commodities around here."
"Bull crap! You had them eating up those stupid 'I'm a cowboy' stories and you know it," Kyle yelled. "The one about you saving your sister from the bull was classic. Classic!"
"Eat me," Rodney said, embarrassed. — Shelly Crane

How many toes did I have when we left London, does anyone remember?" Jim asked, examining its feet. "I think one is missing."
"Stop fussing about a missing toe. We have more important things to focus on, like finding Drake and saving him from whatever trouble he's in," I answered, straightening my clothing and zipping up my heavy parka.
"Oh, man, I am missing one! I know I had four on this foot! What sort of place was that company you used, demon-haters or something?"
"Budget Teleporters is a perfectly good company. Didn't you listen to their warning about keeping your arms and legs in the portal at all times? — Katie MacAlister

Poverty is like a pain, dormant and unbearable as long as you don't move about too much. You grow used to it, you end up by paying no attention to it. But once you presume to bring it out in the daylight, it becomes terrifying, you see it at last in all its squalor and you shrink from exposing it to the sun. — Gabrielle Roy

I mean, I was born the day war broke out, but I don't remember all the bombs though they did actually break up Liverpool, you know. I remember when I was a little older, there was big gaps in all the streets where houses used to be. We used to play over them. — Ringo Starr

[After World War II:] By now we are used to the rubble, which they clear up religiously and indefatigably. What a determination to get on top again! One could admire it, if one would not be afraid that somewhere lurks another Hitler. But you can't seem to find a single Nazi in Germany! Nobody was one! It was all a dream! — Lotte Lenya

We all lead double lives. It's a privilege for the artist and a curse for the ordinary man. One has to get used to it."
"It's a terrible thing to know too much. In life, our words are improvisations and our actions careless mistakes that end up by becoming habits. Fate beign the distraction of the gods, I distract myself by evading questions that I never asked myself in the past. We are in the hands of the improbable, are we not, my dear Cosette?"
- Monsieur Verjat- — Victor Hugo

asked me if I loved him. Should've told him the truth. That I ain't know enough about myself to love anybody. That I wasn't even sure I had it in me. Maybe folks were born with a specific reserve of love inside them and maybe mine was all used up. But instead of saying any of that I just said, "'Of course I do. — D. Bryant Simmons

I used to link up boom boxes, record one take, play it into another boom box then play all that back into the other one until I had six tracks. It was unlistenable! — Benny Blanco

Up again to the crest, and still no sight of land. Something that looked like clouds - or could it be ships? - far away on his left. Then, down, down, down - he thought he would never reach the end of it . . . this time he noticed how dim the light was. Such tepid revelry in water - such glorious bathing, as one would have called it on earth, suggested as its natural accompaniment a blazing sun. But here there was no such thing. The water gleamed, the sky burned with gold, but all was rich and dim, and his eyes fed upon it undazzled and unaching. The very names of green and gold, which he used perforce in describing the scene, are too harsh for the tenderness, the muted iridescence, of that warm, maternal, delicately gorgeous world. It was mild to look upon as evening, warm like summer noon, gentle and winning like early dawn. It was altogether pleasurable. He sighed. — C.S. Lewis

He had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
Then Trout made a good point, too. 'Well,' he said, 'I used to be a conservationist. I used to weep and wail about people shooting bald eagles with automatic shotguns from helicopters and all that, but I gave it up. There's a river in Cleveland which is so polluted that it catches fire about once a year. That used to make me sick, but I laugh about it now. When some tanker accidentally dumps its load in the ocean, and kills millions of birds and billions of fish, I say, 'More power to Standard Oil,' or whoever it was that dumped it.' Trout raised his arms in celebration. 'Up your ass with Mobil gas,' he said. — Kurt Vonnegut

I was always writing. I was writing in high school because it was a really competitive school for class clowns; I used to have to write all of my snaps and my disses the night before and then act like I was making it up the next day. — John Leguizamo

Closing my eyes, I lowered the wall around my Mori.
'Are you okay? Did I hurt you?'
'Solmi hurt', it replied, still a little upset.
I almost rolled my eyes. One-track mind. 'Solmi is okay', I assured it. 'Did the glow burn you?'
'No burn'. The demon moved forward a little. 'Again?' It asked eagerly.
'Not yet. Soon.'
I opened my eyes and stared at the pretty little lake as I tried to make sense of it all. For the first time, I left the wall down, and my Mori and I sat quietly together, not joined, but as companions. I sighed in contentment. 'This is nice, demon. I could get used to this.'
It curled up like a happy cat. 'Me too. — Karen Lynch

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

Before I ever acted as an amateur - which I did a great deal at school and at university - I used to go to the theater with my parents in the north of England, where I was born and brought up ... Theater of all sorts. — Ian McKellen

That night I did it. I used a utility knife from our garage. It was amazing. For that brief moment, all the tension, anxiety, stress I put on myself disappeared. It went up in a cloud of smoke and my head was finally clear after months of endless internal battles. — S.M. Koz

They ask me what kind of perfume I wear or how I choose a signature scent or what to wear to what occasion. The truth is, I just go into the perfumery and pick out the most beautiful smell. I sniff the scent and then see with my mind's eye the vision that it brings to my heart. If I want to wear that vision with me every day until the bottle is all used-up, then that's the perfume I'll purchase. And I do use it up until there's nothing left and only then do I go out to buy another one. Another vision for another year or two. Fragrance, to me, is about wearing a perspective on your skin. The scent itself is the vehicle by which you can be reminded of those pictures that those notes have opened in your soul. — C. JoyBell C.

We gathered up the kids and sat up on the hill. We had no time to get our chickens and no time to get our horses out of the corral. The water came in and smacked against the corral and broke the horses' legs. The drowned, and the chickens drowned. We sat on the hill and we cried. These are the stories we tell about the river," said [Ladona] Brave Bull Allard. The granddaughter of Chief Brave Bull, she told her story at a Missouri River symposium in Bismark, North Dakota, in the fall of 2003.

Before The Flood, her Standing Rock Sioux Tribe lived in a Garden of Eden, where nature provided all their needs. "In the summer, we would plant huge gardens because the land was fertile," she recalled. We had all our potatoes and squash. We canned all the berries that grew along the river. Now we don't have the plants and the medicine they used to make. — Bill Lambrecht

I grew up in repertory theaters, so it was comedy one night, drama the next. I'm used to going from one to the other. And I worked for years in television as well. So, I like the interrelationship of it and having a good relationship with a group of artists creating something really where the sum is greater than all of our individual contributions, our parts. — Howard Shore

One of the biggest things I used to struggle with was about things like going on holiday. Whereas all your friends can talk about something and plan something all year long, I know that I'm probably going to be away and I'm going to miss all of it. If a job comes up, you just can't be there. — Douglas Booth

I have never met a simple man. Not even in the confessional, though I used to sit there for hours on end. Man was not created simple. When I was a young priest, I used to try to unravel what motives a man or woman had, what temptations and self-delusions. But I soon learned to give all that up, because there was never a straight answer. No one was simple enough for me to understand. In the end I would just say, 'Three Our Fathers, Three Hail Marys. Go in peace. — Graham Greene

At one time, a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conceptions of religion, law and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed ... In the old days, you see, if a man - a Frenchman, for instance- wished to get an education, he would have set to work to study the classics, the theologians, the tragedians, historians and philosophers- and you can realize all the intellectual labour involved. But nowadays he goes straight for the literature of negation, rapidly assimilates the essence of the science of negation, and thinks he's finished. — Leo Tolstoy

You were great tonight, helping with Candice's wound and the funeral ceremony for Chaz ... such as it was."
"I only did what needed doing, and as for your friend's funeral, it was a beautiful good-bye you all gave him," she murmured. "Simple but pure. You honored him well, Kellan."
The phrase she used - one reserved for the solemnest occasions in Breed traditions - touched him in a way he couldn't express. Instead, he tipped her chin up on the edge of his hand and kissed her. Not the hungered kind of kiss that they'd been sharing each time they'd connected since her arrival back in his life a few days ago but a kiss shaped by tender caring and gratitude, by profound respect ... and, yes, love.
He loved this woman.
His woman. — Lara Adrian

I used to sort of take the phone off the hook, you know, put my feet up and watch the TV until it was all over. — Nick Lowe

Words used to be all I had. Now even they have deserted me. — Trishna B. Made It Up Myself

I must be losing patience with my fellow humans," Miss Beryl went on. "Anymore I'm all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet. Now I want to rid the world of them completely. If this keeps up I'll be voting Republican soon. — Richard Russo

And then after a while he got me a job at the video store next door. I used to lock up the store and go next door and hang out all the time and watch movies and stuff. — Jason Mewes

White people found that freedom was indeed indivisible. We had kept saying in the dark days of apartheid's oppression that white South Africans would never be truly free until we blacks were free as well. Many thought it was just another Tutu slogan, irresponsible as all his others had been. Today they were experiencing it as a reality. I used to refer to an intriguing old film The Defiant Ones, in which Sidney Poitier was one of the stars. Two convicts escape from a chain gang. They are manacled together, the one white, the other black. They fall into a ditch with slippery sides. The one convict claws his way nearly to the top and out of the ditch but cannot make it because he is bound to his mate, who has been left at the bottom in the ditch. The only way they can make it is together as they strive up and up and up together and eventually make their way over the side wall and out. — Desmond Tutu

I'm very stodgy. I'm always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I'm looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes - it's all getting infilled. — Edward Ruscha

Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I'll say yes. They're all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we'll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we'll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we'll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we'll never touch it. And then we'll get mad at it, and you know what we'll do? We'll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves. — Ray Bradbury

South Africa used to seem so far away. Then it came home to me. It began to signify the meaning of white hatred here. That was what the sheets and the suits and the ties covered up, not very well. That was what the cowardly guys calling me names from their speeding truck wanted to happen to me, to all of me: to my people. That was what would happen to me if I walked around the corner into the wrong neighborhood. That was Birmingham. That was Brooklyn. That was Reagan. That was the end of reason. South Africa was how I came to understand that I am not against war; I am against losing the war. — June Jordan

The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel's Ammu was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. They way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, though and I. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.
She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double. — Arundhati Roy

His face set in grim determination, Richard slogged ahead, his fingers reaching up to touch the tooth under his shirt. Loneliness, deeper than he had never known, sagged his shoulders. All his friends were lost to him. He knew now that his life was not his own. It belonged to his duty, to his task. He was the Seeker. Nothing more. Nothing less. Not his own man, but a pawn to be used by others. A tool, same as his sword, to help others, that they might have the life he had only glimpsed for a twinkling.
He was no different from the dark things in the boundary. A bringer of death. — Terry Goodkind

I used to dress up in my mom's old clothes and play with these kids from the neighbourhood and make up stories: I would pretend that we were all vampires. — Heather Graham

Lester Levenson used to say, 'Release and allow yourself to see the perfection where the seeming imperfection seems to be.' During this process, welcome your thoughts, your sensations, your feelings, and the stories that you tell yourself. Just allow them all to be here, and know that everything is okay as it is. Part of what happens when we release this is that we start to recognize the perfection underlying our thoughts and feelings. Begin by making yourself comfortable and focusing your attention inwardly. Now, bring to mind ... an issue that's currently up in your awareness. As you think about that situation, problem, intention, or goal, allow yourself to get in touch with your feelings about it right in this very moment.
— Hale Dwoskin

We've used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we're running a federal deficit that's 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It's more stimulative than any policy we've followed since World War II. — Warren Buffett

No. Of all the people who worked for PDM since most of it was sub contracted work, they were all young tradesmen. This is what the state would like for you to believe. But we have very little use for inexperienced teenagers. So they were mostly used for summer..for fillers. It doesn't make sense to use a tradesman to do cleanup work on a job when your paying a tradesman $15 an hour and you can hire a young man or boy at say $7 or $8 an hour to sweep up after the contractors outta there. — John Wayne Gacy

Learning to leave his mind in meditation could be compared to snorkelling, which is breathing with his face under water. Which is just wrong!
It had taken a lot of time and nagging for his brain to get used to snorkelling, for all those doubts and questions to be overcome - for him to relax and just breathe.
Learning to leave his mind in meditation was the same kind of challenge; when there was a gap in his thoughts, when a space opened up, to resist the temptation to immediately fill it up - instead for him to relax and just breathe. — Matt Padwick

I pray not to be such a whiny, self-obsessed baby, and give thanks that I am not quite as bad as I used to be (talk about miracles). Then something comes up, and I overreact and blame and sulk, and it feels like I haven't made any progress at all. But it turns out I'm less of a brat than before, and I hit the reset button much sooner, shake it off, and get my sense if humor back. — Anne Lamott

Everybody has the right to speak up in a democracy. We would be in trouble as a society if there wasn't a constant pressure to make reforms and to be just. Sometimes as prime minister, when i was caught up in a really loud demonstration, I used to say to myself that I deserved it because of all the demonstrations I myself had organized as a student against Duplessis. — Jean Chretien

I used to make up stuff in my bio all the time, that I used to be a professional ice-skater and stuff like that. I found it so inspirational. Why not make myself cooler than I am? — Stephen Colbert

The mere mention of a witch was almost enough to frighten us out of our wits. This was natural enough, because of late years there were more kinds of witches than there used to be; in old times it had been only old women, but of late years they were of all ages - even children of eight and nine; it was getting so that anybody might turn out to be a familiar of the Devil - age and sex hadn't anything to do with it. In our little region we had tried to extirpate the witches, but the more of them we burned the more of the breed rose up in their places. — Mark Twain

Identity is a concept of our age that should be used very carefully. All types of identities, ethnic, national, religious, sexual or whatever else, can become your prison after a while. The identity that you stand up for can enslave you and close you to the rest of the world. — Murathan Mungan

Someone had given Georgie a magic phone and all she'd wanted to do with it is stay up late talking to her old boyfriend. If they'd given her a proper time machine, she probably would have used it to cuddle with him. Let someone else kill Hitler. — Rainbow Rowell

Before Bin Laden did everything but advertise. Yet he had to blow up the Twin Towers just to get the attention of anyone outside the intelligence community. So what did we do? We invaded the wrong country, killed the wrong madman, and too often used the wrong interrogation techniques on the wrong people-all because our leaders lost contact with the truth. — Richard North Patterson

Now he laughs for real, cackling with the wicked innocence of the bright and easily bored. Staff Sergeant David Dime is a twenty-four-year-old college dropout from North Carolina who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Maxim, Wired, Harper's, Fortune, and DicE Magazine, all of which he reads in addition to three or four books a week, mostly used textbooks on history and politics that his insanely hot sister sends from Chapel Hill. There are stories that he went to college on a golf scholarship, which he denies. That he was a star quarterback in high school, which he claims not to remember, though one day a football surfaced at FOB Viper, and Dime, caught up in the moment, perhaps, nostalgia triggering some long-dormant muscle memory, uncorked a sixty-yard spiral that sailed over Day's head into the base motor pool. — Ben Fountain

Why do I need TV when I have forty-eight apartment windows to watch across the vacant lot, and a sliver of Lake Erie? I've seen history out this window. So much. I was four when we moved here in 1919. The fruit-sellers' carts and coal wagons were pulled down the street by horses back then. I used to stand just here and watch the coal brought up by the handsome lad from Groza, the village my parents were born in. Gibb Street was mainly Rumanians back then. It was "Adio" - "Good-bye"- in all the shops when you left. Then the Rumanians started leaving. They weren't the first, or the last. This has always been a working-class neighborhood. It's like a cheap hotel - you stay until you've got enough money to leave. — Paul Fleischman

The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too soon needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness. There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand - ever more distant from the spot where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a movie. Each time it appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. "Wake up," it says. "I'm still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I'm still here." The kicking never hurts me. There's no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. And even that is bound to fade one day. — Haruki Murakami

Whatever is going on- accept it rather than try to fight it. When you accept what is- then you are free to act. You have the energy to take action. You haven't used up all of your energy trying to fight and force things into place. What we resist persists. You will know you are in resistance when you look at what you are trying hard to push away and out of your life. — Sheri Kaye Hoff

A raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, — Mark Twain

There's a phrase, "sitzfleisch", which means just plain sitting on your ass and getting it done. Just showing up for work. My uncle Raphael was a painter, and he used to say, "If the muse is late for work, start without her". You have to be there. You have to be there, and do it, and grind it out, even when it is grinding and you know you're probably going to rewrite all this tomorrow. — Peter S. Beagle

this is real, and it is happening now, just as it happened before: We are under the big tree in my backyard, on that patch of dirt where we used to build fairy houses from moss and sticks and scraps of birch. It is late afternoon. All around us is golden light. We have been together all day, in our cutoff shorts and bare feet. It is the start of fifth grade, the start of being the oldest in the school. Next year, we will be the youngest all over again. But not yet. We are playing that hand-slapping game, the one we like to play at recess. You hold your hands out, palms up, and I place mine lightly on top. You pull yours out and try to slap mine. You hit air three times. On the fourth try, your — Ali Benjamin

It's not just that," Chief Porter said. "A guy who once would have raped and killed a woman, now a lot of times he also has to cut off her lips and mail them to us or take her eyes for a souvenir and keep them in his freezer at home. There's more flamboyant craziness these days." Giving the buttered cinnamon roll a reprieve, Ozzie said, "Maybe it's all these superhero movies with all their supervillains. Some psychopath who used to be satisfied raping and murdering, these days he thinks that he should be in a Batman movie, he wants to be the Joker or the Penguin." "No real-life bad guy wants to be the Penguin," I assured him. "Norman Bates was happy just dressing up like his mother and stabbing people," Chief Porter said, "but Hannibal Lecter has to cut off their faces and eat their livers with fava beans. The role models have become more intense. — Dean Koontz

Wilson-Donovan had already submitted their application to the FDA in January, months before. Based on the information they were developing now, they were going to ask for Vicotec to be put on the "Fast Track," pressing ahead with human trials of the drug, and eventually early release, once the FDA saw how safe it was and Wilson-Donovan proved it to them. The "Fast Track" process was used in order to speed the various steps toward approval, in the case of drugs to be used in life-threatening diseases. Once they got approval from the FDA, they were going to start with a group of one hundred people who would sign informed consent agreements, acknowledging the potential dangers of the treatment. They were all so desperately ill, it would be their only hope, and they knew it. The people who signed up for experiments like this were — Danielle Steel

I used to think that I needed to be part of a story, a big story, one with trials and villains and temptations and rewards. That's how I would conquer it, conquer death."
She sighed again, and nestled in closer to me. "All that matters, in the end, is the little things. The way Mim says my name to wake me up in the morning. The way Bee's hand feels in mine. The way the sun cast my shadow across the yard yesterday. The way your cheeks flush when we kiss. The smell of hay and the taste of strawberries and the feel of fresh black dirt between my toes. This is what matters, Midnight. — April Genevieve Tucholke

I got bigger problems than that life hasn't turned out the way you hoped. You can harp on the past all you please, Dow, like some old woman upset cause her tits used to stay up by themselves, or you can shut your fucking hole and help me get on with things. — Joe Abercrombie

I put away that stuffed God I had all stitched up with my human understandings and fears. God is less formulaic and quantifiable as he once used to be, but experiencing the reality of his love is infinitely better than dragging that other one around. — Jim Palmer

Whatever distinguishes one lump of flesh from another when we're alive, we're all the same once we're dead. Just used-up shells. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You act with your soul. That's why you all want to be actors, because your souls are not used up by life. — Stella Adler

The dress was a deep red, strapless and practically backless, and I was almost positive my maids had used magic to make it stay up at all. — Kiera Cass

Is what how it is for me?" "Do you still know everything, all the time?" She shook her head. She didn't smile. She said, "Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you're going to muck about here." "So you used to know everything?" She wrinkled her nose. "Everybody did. I told you. It's nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play." "To play what?" "This, — Neil Gaiman

Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory. — Erich Maria Remarque

When oranges came in, a curious proceeding was gone through. Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit, for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where, sucking [only I think she used some more recondite word] was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of their own rooms to indulge in sucking oranges. — Elizabeth Gaskell

And how do you explain to your wife that you don't have all the answers, and that you might not know what you are doing, and that you are afraid you are going to fail? How do you admit that you are most afraid that, one day, she'll walk - and replace you with an educated, professor-type guy, who shares her same interests, schedule, and the way she was used to living, especially when all of your friends, your business associates, even your own damned brother, are all just waiting for you to mess up so they can have a shot at taking her away from you? How do you look the woman you love in her eyes and tell her that? — Leslie Esdaile

Anyway, they used to beat up on Barry all the time. They called it roughhousing, which is like men calling lying bullshitting. — Tim Allen

A blanket could be used to wrap up all the love I have to offer you, so it'll be easier for you to carry it across the desert. You'd better get walking, because me and my camel won't be stopping until we have to pee. — Jarod Kintz

For one second I thought I saw it and I reached down and snatched up a little flesh-colored round thing, but ti was just a used round Band-Aid. My mother slapped it out o fmy hand and that was the first moment I realized she was mad at me too. And suddenly it was as if my heart was as uncontrollable as my legs. All this time I thought she was on my side, because I wa son her side. But maybe she had given up on me too. So I didn't say anything more because I was scared she was going to be against me like everyone else. — Jack Gantos

I used to do the beat box. A friend of mine, he was the rapper and after, we'd be doing a block party or something or a house party, and he's gettin' all the attention and I'd end up with a handful of spit, you know, from doing the beats. — DMX

Inside the card, I told Sam that the present I gave her was given to me by my Aunt Helen. It was an old 45 record that had the Beatles' song "Something." I used to listen to it all the time when I was little and thinking about grown-up things. I would go to my bedroom window and stare at my reflection in the glass and the trees behind it and just listen to the song for hours. I decided them that when I met someone I thought was a beautiful as the song. I should give it to that person. And I didn't mean beautiful on the outside. I meant beautiful in all ways. So, I was giving it to Sam. — Stephen Chbosky

It's particularly important for a young woman to be in control of her image - to a certain extent. I mean, there's only so much you can do, because people take photos with you and then all of a sudden they pop up all over the place, they're completely out of context and you have no control over how they're used. — Sarah Gadon

When I was younger, I used to drive up to a bunch of turkeys, roll down the window and say something. They'd all gobble back at once. — Levon Helm

Lily stopped dead in the doorway to her room and then took a step back. Apollo cocked his head. It'd been a very long day full of trepidation mixed with tediousness and he'd used up all his patience. "If you leave, I'll follow you out and we'll have this discussion in the hallway where everyone can hear." She scowled ferociously at him, but came all the way in the room and shut the door. "What do you want to talk about?" "Us." "There's nothing to discuss." "Yes," he said patiently, "there is. — Elizabeth Hoyt

Supposing there was justice for all, after all? For every unheeded beggar, every harsh word, every neglected duty, every slight ... every choice ... Because that was the point, wasn't it? You had to choose. You might be right, you might be wrong, but you had to choose, knowing that the rightness or wrongness might never be clear or even that you were deciding between two sorts of wrong, that there was no right anywhere. And always, always, you did it by yourself. You were the one there, on the edge, watching and listening. Never any tears, never any apology, never any regrets ... You saved all that up in a way that could be used when needed. — Terry Pratchett

To picture Roosevelt as a man at this time in his life - he felt he was old. He was 53 years old, feeling lonely and irrelevant. And all of a sudden, he takes on this campaign, and it becomes a crusade for popular government. And he ultimately goes on fire in the campaign, but he discovers he's up against all the old machine tactics that he used to use himself, and he has to let the public get involved. And he energizes the public through the most extreme kind of rhetoric, which truly brings him into the streets and onto his side. — Geoffrey Cowan

My father used to say that sometimes, the best way to help someone is just to be near them. I feel good when I do something I know he would be proud of, like it makes up for all the things I've done that he wouldn't be proud of. — Veronica Roth

I used to hope that if I went to church long enough, all my inside weight would go away. That ain't right. Jesus may have come to take away our sins, but he left our feelings right where they've always been. I still have inside me some of what I've always had, built up over a lifetime. I just keep adding to it, everyday, like everybody else, and hope the stew gets better the more ingredients I put in. — Todd Johnson

Perhaps I don't express myself very well. But you all demand so much from life--you're never satisfied. In the old days, a poor man was content if he had something to eat and a roof over his head. Nowadays, everything has to be so high-and-mighty. Everything you set your minds on, you have to have, whether you can afford it or not.... And everyone's up to their eyebrows in debt... A fat lot of use it is having schools, books and I don't know what! In the old days we used to be a lot more reasonable. — Hedin Bru

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

Are you conscious of a growing failure of your bodily powers? Do you expect to suffer long nights of languishing and days of pain? O be not sad! That bed may become a throne to you. You little know how every pang that shoots through your body may be a refining fire to consume your dross
a beam of glory to light up the secret parts of your soul. Are the eyes growing dim? Jesus will be your light. Do the ears fail you? Jesus' name will be your soul's best music, and His person your dear delight. Socrates used to say, "Philosophers can be happy without music;" and Christians can be happier than philosophers when all outward causes of rejoicing are withdrawn. In Thee, my God, my heart shall triumph, come what may of ills without! By thy power, O blessed Spirit, my heart shall be exceeding glad, though all things should fail me here below. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless. — Charles Bukowski

Anyway, it's like when Kate Hudson was hooking up with that Jonas brother. It was kind of weird at first and then we all got used to it and nobody gave it a second thought. If anything, people applauded her because she's not afraid to go after what she wants. And she really wanted that cute little Jonas brother. — Winter Renshaw

Archaeologists have not yet discovered any stage of human existence without art. Even in the half-light before the dawn of humanity we received this gift from Hands we did not manage to discern. Nor have we managed to ask: Why was this gift given to us and what are we to do with it? And all those prophets who are predicting that art is disintegrating, that it has used up all its forms, that it is dying, are mistaken. We are the ones who shall die. And art will remain. The question is whether before we perish we shall understand all its aspects and all its ends. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn