Being Backward Quotes & Sayings

Without fail, every cartoonist that I asked advice from bent over backward to be helpful and encouraging. It took many forms: some of it was just an implicit acceptance, like being invited along to the dinner with all of the good cartoonists, or sitting down at a drafting table with an artist and him showing me how to draw backgrounds and perspectives. — Adrian Tomine

Every human being has both sets of forces within him. One set clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging on to the past, afraid to grow away from the primitive communication with the mother's uterus and breast, afraid to take chances, afraid to jeopardize what he already has, afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels him forward toward wholeness of Self and uniqueness of Self, toward full functioning of all his capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that he can accept his deepest, real, unconscious Self. — Abraham H. Maslow

I guess it's time.
While Cress's thoughts continued to churn through the horrible things that could happen to her, she felt herself being suddenly spun around and dipped backward, a supportive arm scooping beneath her back. She yelped and caught herself on Thorne's shoulder.
Then he was kissing her. — Marissa Meyer

I do not want to be cynical, but if developing nations are kept backward by being told, again and again, you belong to the poor and you are there, where you actually belong, then nothing will change. — Paul Kagame

Sometimes I look at where we've come to, and how much technology and advancement there is, and I can't believe that we're not this perfectly balanced, beautiful, peaceful society. I'm shocked that we're so deeply polarized, that there are people who want progress and they feel guilty for wanting progress, because it somehow seems un-American, because being American means staying ignorant and going backward. — Rashida Jones

Ataturk approved of the mevlevi dervish approach to God as being 'an expression of Turkish genius' that reclaimed Islam from what he saw as hide-bound, backward Arab tradition. — Stephen Kinzer

I don't miss anything ever. Because to me, missing something is like going backward a little bit. I don't miss being in a punk band. For me, 'SNL' is like ... this is gonna sound overly dramatic, but ... the way I am, it feels like I'm a soldier, so it was like, 'What do you want me to do? Put me anywhere. Do you want me to do these sketches? Great.' — Fred Armisen

I thought this couldn't happen in astronomy. Isn't celestial mechanics supposed to be an exact science? So we poor backward biologists were always being told. — Arthur C. Clarke

He had always disliked the people who encored a favorite air in an opera - "That just spoils it" had been his comment. But this now appeared to him as a principle of far wider application and deeper moment. This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backward . . . was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself - perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defense against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film. He — C.S. Lewis

To me, racial barriers do not exist in reality. If I say that 'everyone under the sun is a member of a universal family,' you may think that I am bluffing and being idealistic. But if anyone still believes in racial differences, I think he is too backward and narrow in his perspective. Perhaps he still does not understand man's equality and love. — Bruce Lee

People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
...
She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort. — Wallace Stegner

We start with the perfect experience and then work backward. That's how we're going to continue to be successful. — Brian Chesky

I inhale slowly, soaking it all in. I step forward and backward, my neck twisting and turning, memorizing every corner. I feel an instant connection to this place. Something about being here grabs me and infatuates me. I begin taking mental pictures of the narrow alleys decorated with rows of artists and vendors. I start imagining myself dining at the sidewalk cafes, sitting there with Chad during the summer, spring, winter, and fall. I get this strong desire to take off my shoes and walk barefooted on the cobblestones as if I have found my new home. — Corey M.P.

The world is a treadmill, and we are being pulled backward on it if we aren't consciously walking forward. — J. Grant Howard

Islam was really strict about the whole "premarital sex" thing. The penalty for being raped, not for the rapist but for the girl who was raped, was stoning. Generally the family of the rapist paid a nominal fee and it was all good. Rape was, in fact, a way of exacting punishment on someone in (really backward) Islamic societies. — John Ringo

A few weeks ago, my manager asked: "Do you feel like you're back? I feel like you're back." She meant it as a total compliment, but we had this great conversation where I was like, "You know what? I try really hard not to use that language, because it's not about going backward in life." I think it comes from this culture of antiaging, which is so not loving ourselves. I've been really focused on not being "back" to anything, but being the best version of myself right now. My body is the site of a miracle now. I don't want to be pre-miracle. — Kerry Washington

I wonder if we have it all backward. And I wonder how the world might be if we viewed the very reason for our existence as being not about control and security but about surrender. Not to our fears and insecurities but to our sense of what is possible, to the belief that we all have the ability to shape the world as we imagine it, and that our actions reflect this imagined world until it becomes not imagined, but real. — Ben Hewitt

At the collective level, pride is expressed in the conviction of being superior to others as a nation or a race, of being the guardian of the true values of civilization, and of the need to impose this dominant "model" on "ignorant" peoples by any means available. This attitude often serves as a pretext for "developing" the resources of underdeveloped countries. The conquistadors and their bishops burned the vast Mayan and Aztec libraries of Mexico, of which barely a dozen volumes survive. Chinese textbooks and media continue to describe Tibetans as backward barbarians and the Dalai Lama as a monster. It was pride, above all, that allowed the Chinese to ignore the hundreds of thousands of volumes of philosophy housed in Tibetan monasteries before they demolished six thousand of those centers of learning. — Matthieu Ricard

arrow goes foreword after being pulled backward. A bullet goes forward after the trigger being pulled backwards. Every human being will be happy only after they face their difficulties in their path...So don't be afraid to face them for they will push you forward — Unknown

My being consists of matter and form, that is, of soul and body; annihilation will reach neither of them, for they were never produced out of nothing. The consequence is, that every part of me will serve to make something in the world; and this again will change into another part through an infinite succession of change. This constant method of alteration gave me my being, and my father before me, and so on to eternity backward: for I think I may speak thus, even though the world be confined within certain determinate periods. — Marcus Aurelius

Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence. — William Faulkner

The clear stars before him took to shuddering and he knew why; they shuddered at sight of what was behind him. He had never divined before that strange Things hid themselves from men, under pretence of being snow-clad mounds of swaying trees; but now they came slipping out from their harmless covers to follow him, and mock at his impotence to make a kindred Thing resolve to truer form. He knew the air behind him was thronged; he heard the hum of innumerable murmurings together; but his eyes could never catch them - they were too swift and nimble; but he knew they were there, because, on a backward glance, he saw the snow mounds surge as they grovelled flatlings out of sight; he saw the trees reel as they screwed themselves rigid past recognition among the boughs. — Clemence Housman

We should avoid being backward-looking, concerned with restoration and reaction, for it is the last few centuries that have spawned the pox that is now devouring us.
It is a matter of returning to archaic and ancestral values, while at the same time envisioning the future as something more than the extension of the present. — Guillaume Faye

We've got to turn this backward thinking around where ignorance is championed over intelligence. Young black kids being ridiculed by their peers for getting A's and speaking proper English: that's criminal. — Spike Lee

Business in Russia was not being done like in the West, with contracts. In Russia, hundreds of millions of dollars were going forward and backward by word of mouth. — David Reuben

Just think about this: haven't we been going just to and fro? The whole world rather. Years back, it was good to take vitamin supplements and today they are considered hampering body's natural immune. Sometime back, people were desperate to land up in high paying jobs, today there is a big entrepreneurship fad. Back in years, it was a pride to be settled in the city, now people are giving up all responsibilities to settle at a peaceful country side.
What are we all really doing? We are moving from pillar to post, forward and backward on theories. We are all as confused as the next person. And unfortunately, we are all going to leave this world with barely being able to decipher much. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

O my brothers, your nobility should not look backward but ahead! Exiles shall you be from all father- and forefather-lands! Your children's land shall you love: this love shall be your new nobility - the undiscovered land in the most distant sea. For that I bid your sails search and search. In your children you shall make up for being the children of your fathers: thus shall you redeem all that is past. — Friedrich Nietzsche

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it - all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary - but love it — Friedrich Nietzsche

In the book of Job, the Lord demands, "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?"

"I was there!"-surely that is the answer to God's question. For no matter how the universe came into being, most of the atoms in these fleeting assemblies that we think of as our bodies have been in existence since the beginning. Each breath we take contains hundreds of thousands of the inert, pervasive argon atoms that were actually breathed in his lifetime by the Buddha, and indeed contain parts of all the 'snorts, sighs, bellows, shrieks" of all creatures that ever existed or will exist. These atoms flow backward and forward in such useful but artificial constructs as time and space, in the same universal rhythms, universal breath as the tides and stars, joining both the living and the dead in that energy which animates the universe. — Peter Matthiessen

you, and have no little girls' clothes to mend." "Yes," said Maggie. "It is with me as I used to think it would be with the poor uneasy white bear I saw at the show. I thought he must have got so stupid with the habit of turning backward and forward in that narrow space that he would keep doing it if they set him free. One gets a bad habit of being unhappy." "But I shall put you under a discipline of pleasure that will make you lose that bad habit," said Lucy, sticking the black butterfly absently in her own collar, while her eyes met Maggie's affectionately. "You dear, tiny thing," said Maggie, in one of her bursts of loving admiration, "you enjoy other people's happiness so much, I believe you would do without any of your own. I wish I were like you." "I've never been tried in that way," said Lucy. "I've always — George Eliot

Are you super strong? Can you be hurt?"
"Of course I can," replied Dimitri. "I'm strong, but all sorts of things can still hurt me."
And then being Rose Hathaway, I said something I really shouldn't have to the boy. "You should go punch him and find out."
Jonathan's mother screamed again, but he was a fast little bastard, eluding her grasp. He ran up to Dimitri before anyone could stop him-well, I could have-and pounded his tiny fist against Dimitri's knee.
Then, which the same reflexes that allowed him to dodge enemy attacks, Dimitri immediately feinted falling backward, as though Jonathan had knocked him over. Clutching his knee, Dimitri groaned as though he were in terrible pain.
Several people laughed, and by then, one of the other guardians had caught hold of Jonathan and returned him to his near-hysterical mother. As he was being dragged away, Jonathan glanced over his shoulder at Dimitri. "He doesn't seem very strong to me. I don't think he's a Strigoi. — Richelle Mead

Where we choose to be, where we choose to be
we have the power to determine that in our lives. We cannot reel time backward or forward, but we can take ourselves to the place that defines our being. — Sena Jeter Naslund

I always get so overwhelmed trying to do everything perfectly. I can't do a job and not put everything I have into it. I need to be the best employee, the best co-worker, the best whatever. I need everyone to like me and I just burn out bending over backward to make that happen. Having people be mad at me is my worst fear. I can't stand it. There is this crazy fear I have of being rejected by anyone - even people I don't really care about. It's always better to leave them first, cut all ties, and disappear. They can't hurt me that way - no one can. — Nic Sheff

And then, being Rose Hathaway, I said something I really shouldn't have to the boy. "You should go punch him and find out."
Jonathan's mother screamed again, but he was a fast little bastard, eluding her grasp. He ran up to Dimitri before anyone could stop him - well, I could have - and pounded his tiny fist against Dimitri's knee.
Then, with the same reflexes that allowed him to dodge enemy attacks, Dimitri immediately feinted falling backward, as though Jonathan had knocked him over. Clutching his knee, Dimitri groaned as though he were in terrible pain. — Richelle Mead

Perhaps making movies is a step toward being able to move backward and forward and in and out of linear time. — Eleanor Coppola

Her perception was propelled backward, as if it were being pulled into a vortex. She slammed into her body, and her eyes flew open with a gasp.

"Alex?"

She sat straight up in the chair and grabbed Caleb by the shoulders. "We have to save them. — G.S. Jennsen

The world," said Pavone, "will swing to the left. The whole world except America. The world will swing, not because people read Karl Marx, or because agitators will come out of Russia, but because, after the war is over, that will be the only way they can turn. Everything else will have been tried, everything else will have failed. And I am afraid that American will be isolated, hated, backward, we will all be living there like old maids in a lonely house in the woods, locking the doors, looking under the beds, with a fortune in the mattress, not being able to sleep, because every time the wind blows and a floor creaks, we will think the murderers are breaking in to kill us and take our treasure ... — Irwin Shaw

I didn't understand her being gone, either. I had seen her fall. Now her part of any conversation would always be unsaid, and the direction she would have gone walking would always be empty. Her absence extended in lines of numbers made of smoke, backward in memory and forward in futures never to occur. — Gordon Dahlquist

She's learned it's largely a matter of being willing to ask the next question. She's met the very Mexican who first wore his baseball cap backward, asking the next question. — William Gibson

Namaste is a term that finds its origin in India means the God in me salutes the God in you. This means that every human being has a God in her or him. I wonder where in time we forgot this wisdom and started treating fellow human beings as untouchables and backward classes. — Jeroninio Almeida

I'm sorry for screwing everything up. I hurt you again, and for that I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I don't want to do that anymore. So ... I'm not going to stay
for the wedding. I'm just going to take off now. I won't see you again, not for a long time. Probably for the best. Being near you like this, it hurts. And
Jere" - Conrad cleared his throat and stepped backward, making space between us - "he's the one who needs you."
Hoarsely, he said, "I need you to know that no matter what happens, it was worth it to me. Being with you, loving you. It was all worth it — Jenny Han

The question is, are you going to grow or are you going to just stay as you are out of fear and waste your precious human life by status quo-ing instead of being willing to break the sound barrier? Break the glass ceiling, or whatever it is in your own life? Are you willing to go forward? I suggest finding the willingness to go forward instead of staying still, which is essentially going backward, particularly when you have a calling in some direction. That calling needs to be answered. And it's not necessarily going to work out the way you want it to work out, but it is taking you forward, and you are leaving the nest. And that never can be a mistake - to fly instead of staying in the nest with all the poop and everything that's in there. TS: — Pema Chodron

Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the attempt to avoid physical exertion. Now a group of backward-thinking atavists mounted on foot-powered pairs of Hula-Hoops would have us pumping our legs, gritting our teeth, and searing our lungs as though we were being chased across the Pleistocene savanna by saber-toothed tigers. Think of the hopes, the dreams, the effort, the brilliance, the pure force of will that, over the eons, has gone into the creation of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Bicycle riders would have us throw all this on the ash heap of history. — P. J. O'Rourke

There is no basis to say I'm being coy about running for president. If I chose to explore the presidency, I wouldn't do it in a backward way. I'll say, 'I'm exploring the presidency.' — Mario Cuomo

You'll notice that I said guidelines and not rules. Guidelines allow for some flexibility, some discretion. Rules are more likely to be enforced in a hard and fast manner, which can leave little room for interpretation and will probably lead to you having to deal with more nutcases who insist on reading them fifty times backward and forward in hopes of finding an angle where they think you are being inconsistent. Your user guidelines are a key communication tool for you. They are a type of vision statement for your community. By putting your expectations of users in writing, you are letting everyone know what your vision is for your community. By communicating this, people will know what they are in for and will either get behind you (and participate) or get away from you. Either way, they will at least know what your community is all about, and having this level of communication is vital to your success. — Patrick O'Keefe

When we think about the kind of person we want others to remember us for being, it's much easier to work backward from our deaths — Craig Groeschel

We stopped. Aly looked back the way we'd come. "Cass? Where are we headed?" Cass glanced around. "Actually . . . I'm not sure. I lost the map in the river." "Don't play games," Aly snapped. "You don't need it. You know the route." "I did," Cass said. "But . . . it's not there, Aly. In my brain. I can't call it up." "What do you mean, not there?" Aly said. "If you're being insecure again, like you were in Babylon, now's the time to stop." Cass's eyes were hollow and scared. "I don't feel insecure. This is so strange . . ." I looked at him closely. "Cass, can you say 'River Nostalgikos' backward?" "Nostalgikos . . . River?" Cass said. "Oh, dear," Professor Bhegad muttered. "Cass, you had the ability to say anything backward, letter for letter," Aly said. "You called it Backwardish." Cass swallowed hard. "Dishwardback?" "The river . . ." Professor Bhegad said. "It took the ability from him." "Skilaki warned us," Aly said softly. "She said the river required a sacrifice . . . — Peter Lerangis

Within 25 years, virtual reality meetings will be essentially transparent to being there in person. Once we can do this, the idea of climbing into an aircraft, and burning up huge quantities of fossil fuels to propel our bodies and briefcases full of papers, will seem absolutely backward. — Burt Rutan

Frantic as my arousal built. The feel of Gideon's finger in that darkly sexual place, thrusting in that gentle rhythm, had me rocking backward to meet his inward drives. "You're so beautiful," he murmured, his voice infinitely gentle. "I love making you feel good. Love watching an orgasm move through your body." "Gideon." I was lost, drowning in the powerful joy of being held by him, loved by him. Four days alone had taught me how miserable I'd be if we couldn't work things out, how dull and colorless my world would be without him in it. "I need — Sylvia Day

The connection being that in my head all language began in song and that the best stories inevitably reutrn to song, to a state of rapture. For years, I had assumed that throwing beautiful words at the page would make my prose feel true. But I had the process exactly backward. It was truth that lifted the language into beauty and toward song. It was a matter of doing what Joe Henry did, of pursuing characters into moments of emotional truth and slowing down. The result was a compression of sensual and psychological detail that released the rhythm and melody in language itself, what Longfellow called the happy accidents of language. — Steve Almond

Be grateful simply for being alive. When you are grateful for life, pure and simple, your life becomes one you can be grateful for. That may strike you as circular or even backward logic, but your attitude really does have an effect on how things work out. When you can't change your life any other way, you can still change your attitude. When you do, your life changes. You find more chances to love, and you will be surprised to see how much more love is returned to you. — Bernie Siegel

It is interesting to me that the secularizers bend over backward in our federally controlled schools to keep atheists from being offended by the mention of God, prayer, or morality, yet over the federally controlled airwaves Christians can be offended every day of the week by the broadcasting of blasphemy against God and the Lord Jesus Christ or attacks on our moral values. — Tim LaHaye

V.V. sought to express something, which until expressed had only a twilight being (or even none at all
nothing but the illusion of the backward shadow of its imminent expression). It was Ada's castle of cards. It was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick's difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterful or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time. — Vladimir Nabokov

That present sucked," I muttered.
Dad slipped an arm around my shoulder and helped me sit up. As he did, his sleeve fell back to reveal several slivers of demonglass embedded in his forearm.
"I'm fine," he said before I could ask. "Cal can get them out later. Are you all right?"
My shoulder was still on fire, but there was no pain anywhere else, and other than the shock of being blown backward and stabbed, I was peachy. "I think so. What was that, like a magic pipe bomb?"
The present lay in tatters on the floor, its ribbon coiling and snapping like a snake. Cal stomped on the ribbon, and it went still. "Seems like it," he said grimly.
"And it was ensorcelled to seek you out," Dad added. He looked so worried and angry that I decided not to give him a hard time for using a word like ensorcelled. — Rachel Hawkins

It's the pausing and the stopping, perhaps going backward and losing some time, not being able to do everything we're supposed to do, that serves the soul. That's the enchantment that feeds the soul. — Thomas Moore

In my own opinion (key word), the foundation of feminism is this: being able to choose. The core of anti-feminism is, conversely, telling a woman she can't do something solely because she's a woman - taking any choice away from her specifically because of her gender ... One of the weird things about modern feminism is that some feminists seem to be putting their own limits on women's choices. That feels backward to me. It's as if you can't choose a family on your own terms and still be considered a strong woman. How is that empowering? Are there rules about if, when, and how we love or marry and if, when, and how we have kids? Are there jobs we can and can't have in order to be a "real" feminist? To me, those limitations seem anti-feminist in basic principle. — Stephenie Meyer

I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power'
or else not. — C.S. Lewis

The sound shivers through the walls, through the table, through the window frame, and into my finger. These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics. Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed ... and this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world. — Chuck Palahniuk