Quotes & Sayings About Being Counted Out

Y-naga: "That's the thing ... It's like trying to find a guy who's a kid at heart but still a responsible adult, so he can be counted on when I find myself in a pinch, somebody who's a little wild at times but normally lets me have my way even when I'm being selfish and just says, "well, if you insist," a guy who's not too full of himself but understands what clothes suit his body type best ... "
S-hara: "What I'm saying is the pretty ones are stupid! The ones who have it all together are all so, so stubborn that they never do things my way! — Fumi Yoshinaga

I have three copies of the first edition, which sold in double figures, speaking loosely; there was a moment when Blond's 'Lord Malquist and Mr Moon' sold 67 copies, or some such number, in Venezuela - a mystery I never solved. I have never been to Venezuela. I remember going into Foyles' bookshop in 1966 and being gratified to see a stack of Malquist-and-Moons on the New Fiction table. I counted them; there were twelve. A week or two later I went in again; there they were. I counted them again; there were thirteen! I saw at once what was happening. People were leaving my book at bookshops. — Tom Stoppard

Yes, Boss?'
Dorcas, the last twenty or thirty years I've been a worthless, no-good parasite.'
She yawned again. 'Everybody knows that.'
Nevermind the flattery. There comes a time in every man's life when he has to stop being sensible
a time to stand up and be counted
strike a blow for liberty
smite the wicked.'
Ummm ... '
So quit yawning, the time has come.'
She glanced down. 'Maybe I had better get dressed. — Robert A. Heinlein

Consider also the special word they used: survivor. Something new. As long as they didn't have to say human being. It used to be refugee, but by now there was no such creature, no more refugees, only survivors. A name like a number
counted apart from the ordinary swarm. Blue digits on the arm, what difference? They don't call you a woman anyhow. Survivor. Even when your bones get melted into the grains of the earth, still they'll forget human being. Survivor and survivor and survivor; always and always. Who made up these words, parasites on the throat of suffering! — Cynthia Ozick

Rather it was being aware of what you were doing, where the sounds were coming from, what emotions they sprang from. And how your breath gave birth to the sounds. Much of what Peter sang that day, most people would have called noise. That didn't bother Viktor. It was the authenticity and the discovery that counted. — Alan McCluskey

Listening to your tape, I was reminded of this poem. It has the central question: Is it harder to count on someone or to know that you're being the one counted upon? Anyway, there's this part that goes: if equal affection cannot be, then let the more loving one be me. Have you ever read that one? It's one of my favorites. — Janeane Garofalo

A woman may achieve greatness, or at any rate great renown, by merely being a wonderful wife and mother, like the mother of the Gracchi; whereas the men who have achieved great renown by being devoted husbands and fathers might be counted on the fingers of one hand. Charles I was an unfortunate king, but an admirable family man. Still, you would scarcely class him as one of the world's great fathers, and his children were not an unqualified success. Dear me! Being a great father is either a very difficult or a very sadly unrewarded profession. Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him - or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them. — Dorothy L. Sayers

At low tide, much of the sea changes to land, and then more than seven hundred islands can be counted. People come here to hide, to find something they can't find on the mainland, to get religion through solitude. From June till September, nearly every day is perfect, with the 10,778-foot volcano of Mount Baker rising from the tumble of the Cascades to the west, blue herons and bald eagles crowding the skies, killer whales breaching offshore. The water is exceptionally clear, the result of a twice-daily shift-change in tide, when it sweeps north toward the Strait of Georgia, then back south toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In some places, the rip tides create white water like rapids on a foaming river. Being is bliss. But then the winters come and the tourists all go home and clouds hang on the horizon and unemployment doubles and the island dweller is left with whatever it is that led him to escape the rest of the world. — Timothy Egan

I didn't have anyone, but every time I walked through those doors I felt like each of those authors was my family and the characters they created were all my friends. I counted on them. They were all I ever had. All I still have. Now that the store may go out of business I feel like I'm losing my family and friends. I love all my books. Being a book lover saved my life. — J.L. Mac

If an instrument similar to a geiger-counter could be invented that counted moral judgements instead, we would learn to duck as people became increasingly 'moral', since lethal force is usually imminent. So far from moral fervour being an alternative to force, it is frequently the overture, the accompaniment and the memorial to it. — Charles Hampden-Turner

But finding a voice-let's be clear-is a political act. It defines a moment of presence, of being awake; and it involves not only self-understanding, but the ability to transmit that selfunderstanding to others ... To experience yourself as "voiceless" is a definition of depression, subjugation, and being counted out. — Mary Rose O'Reilley

I've always had a loud mouth, and for that I've gotten a lot of attention. I did falter in some big competitions in my career, but being counted out and not being seen as a threat is something I'm used to. — Johnny Weir

Practically every mental health care practitioner, from the most erudite psychoanalysts to untrained self-help gurus, tell us that it is infinitely more fulfilling and we are all saner if we tell the truth, yet most of us are not rushing to stand up and be counted among the truth tellers. Indeed, as someone committed to being honest in daily life I experience the constant drag of being seen as a 'freak,' for telling the truth, even when I speak truthfully about simple matters. If a friend gives me a gift and asks me to tell him or her whether I like it, I will respond honestly and judiciously; that is to say I will speak the truth in a positive, caring manner. Yet even in this situation, the person who asks for honesty will often express annoyance when given a truthful response. — Bell Hooks

I never knew what an extraordinary thing it could be to write a book. In the first place, the characters take the bit between their jaws and canter off with you into places you don't want and never catered for. I had smugly intended my book to be about a family rather like ours, but, lud love you! it's already turned into an account of a barmaid's career in an Edgware Road pub, and I can't squeeze us in anywhere!

Odd things happen, too. I had called my pub, 'The Three Feathers,' and counted on there being heaps of pubs in Edgware Road, not called that, but looking a bit like my description. Before we left home, I went down Edgware Road to investigate, and found my pub, even down to the old-fashioned phonograph on the table in the upstairs sitting-room. And I thought, 'I built that place. — Rachel Ferguson

Ellen had long ago stopped being embarrassed by temper tantrums. She flipped it and wore it like a badge of honor. A temper tantrum was a sign that a mom said no when it counted. — Lisa Scottoline

Because a person has to be either working or looking for work to be counted as part of the labor force, an increase in the number of people too discouraged to continue their search for work would reduce the unemployment rate, all else being equal - but not for a positive reason. — Ben Bernanke

None of us can know today if tomorrow morning we will not be counted as part of a group considered outside the law. In that moment the civilized veneer of life changes, as the state props of well-being disappear and are transformed into omens of destruction. The luxury liner becomes a battleship, or the black jolly roger and the red executioner's flag are hoisted on it. — Ernst Junger

Of course my moods change, but the average is serenity. I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too; at all events, I think it such a great blessing when a man has found his work that I cannot count myself among the unfortunate. I mean, I may be in certain relatively great difficulties, and there may be gloomy days in my life, but I shouldn't like to be counted among the unfortunate, nor would it be correct if I were. — Vincent Van Gogh

Being guided by your own thoughts and abilities, living out there on the high wire and being rewarded for it: That was the Chicago way. Nothing else counted. If it were sensational enough, whether a scientific breakthrough, a rousing new style of music, or an underworld murder, it would be celebrated. — Douglas Perry

And suddenly, lying in bed, I became aware of every inch of my body and I apologised to it, quietly. I apologised for bring so ungrateful for so long. Then I thanked my arms, hands and fingers for always trying so hard. I thanked my legs and feet for holding me up all the time. I thanked my brain for working so amazingly well and conjuring up thoughts and dreams and sentences and images and crazy poems. And I thanked all my organs for working together and giving me life. It had taken four and a half billion years for me to be here. Right now. In this universe. And in that moment, I felt totally overwhelmed at being alive. There could be nothing but there was everything. I didn't want to waste a single second more worrying about trivialities. Worrying that I'd never match up to an ideal that didn't even exist. Nobody is normal. We are all different. I had to make sure that every moment I had left on this planet counted. — Francesca Martinez

The American Dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class. — James Truslow Adams

Yet what choice did he have? Nothing about this war was fair. Nothing about being Jewish was fair, The only question that counted was whether he wanted to live or not, and he did. — Joel C. Rosenberg

What are you doing here? (Delphine)
Being counted among friends. But for the record, you guys better not lose. I don't want my ass fried over this, or any other body parts, either. (Asmodeus) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I have always been very open and honest about this part of my life with my friends, my family, and my colleagues. In a perfect world, I don't think it's anyone else's business, but I do think there is value in standing up and being counted. I'm not an activist, but I am a human being and I don't give that up by being a journalist. — Anderson Cooper

The gain isn't counted to the recluse and inactive that, having nothing to measure themselves by and never being tested by failure, they simmer and soak perpetually in conscious complacency. — Alice James

For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we're alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.
Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed SOMETIMES, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer
you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. — Chad Harbach

Public men in America are too public. Too accessible. This sitting on the stoop and being 'just folk' was all very well for local politics and the simple farmer days of a hundred years ago, but it's no good for world affairs. Opening flower-shows and being genial to babies and all that is out of date. These parish politics methods have to go. The ultimate leader ought to be distant, audible but far off. Show yourself and then vanish into a cloud. Marx would never have counted for one tenth of his weight as 'Charlie Marx' playing chess with the boys, and Woodrow Wilson threw away all his magic as far as Europe was concerned when he crossed the Atlantic. Before he crossed he was a god -- what a god he was! After he arrived he was just a grinning guest. I've got to be the Common Man, yes, but not common like that. — H.G.Wells

Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you're not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn't planned or counted on. — Henri Nouwen

he guessed they all knew what he'd done and counted him foolish for blatantly going against their boss. Well, he reasoned as he dropped his jacket over the high back of his chair, there was a Bible verse about the world's wisdom being foolish in the sight of God. — Kim Vogel Sawyer

He didn't want to puff her up. Puffed-up women are one of the original sources of trouble in the world. If anyone knew that, it was he. He counted it as one of his duties to mankind to keep women from puffing themselves up, though it had been a most monumental duty in his own marriage. A job requiring a hero. It was one of those things that God, being male, questioned you about before you were let into heaven, and he was proud to say that he hadn't neglected it. — Judith Merkle Riley

Colleen had this idea -- a faded, crumpled, smudged idea -- that being nice counted for something. — Lauren Tarshis

Being wealthy isn't just a question of having lots of money. It's a question of what we want. Wealth isn't an absolute, it's relative to desire. Every time we seek something that we can't afford, we can be counted as poor, how much money we may actually have. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

As a human, I'd never been best at anything ... Obviously I could be counted out of anything athletic. Not artistic or musical, no particular talents to brag of. Nobody ever gave away a trophy for reading books. After eighteen years of mediocrity, I was pretty used to being average. I realized now that I'd long ago given up any aspirations of shining at anything. — Stephenie Meyer

And I don't know, it is one thing to look out a window, but when you are Out, actually Out, that is something very powerful, and how embarrassing was that, because I could not help it, I went down flat on my gut checking out those flowers, and the feeling of the one I chose was like the silk on that Hermes jacket I could never seem to get Reserved because Vance was always hogging it, except the flower was even better, it being very smooth and built in like layers? With the outside layer being yellow, and inside that a white thing like a bell, and inside the white bell-like thing were fifteen (I counted) smaller bell-like red things, and inside each red thing was an even smaller orange two-dingly-thing combo. — George Saunders

He hoped she might make some amends for the many very plain faces he was continually passing in the streets. The worst of Bath was the number of its plain women. He did not mean to say there were not pretty women, but the number of the plain was out of all proportion. He had frequently observed, as he walked, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he had stood in a shop on Bond street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, without there being a tolerable face among them ... But still, there certainly were a dreadful multitude of ugly women in Bath; and as for the men! they were infinitely worse. Such scarecrows as the streets were full of! — Jane Austen

I picked up a mug with the complicated name of a medication stamped across the side, and a slogan about Treating Today for Tomorrow. They're handed out to places like this by visiting drug companies. Last time I went in the office to borrow the Nursing Dictionary, I counted three mugs, a mouse mat, a bunch of pens, two Post-it note booklets and the wall clock - all sporting the brands of different medicines. It's like being in prison and having to look at adverts for fucking locks. — Nathan Filer

The peculiar idea that bigger is better has been around for at least as long as I have, and it's always bothered me. There is within it the implication that it is more difficult for God to care about a gnat than about a galaxy. Creation is just as visible in a grain of sand as in a skyful of stars.
The church is not immune from the bigger-is-better heresy. One woman told of going to a meeting where only a handful of people turned out, and these faithful few were scolded by the visiting preacher for the sparseness of the congregation. And she said indignantly, 'Our Lord said *feed* my sheep, not count them!' I often feel that I'm being counted, rather than fed, and so I am hungry. — Madeleine L'Engle

We've got ballots flying around, being counted by hand, arriving by truck and in God knows whose custody. — David Axelrod

One with God is always a majority. But many have been burned at the stake while the boats were being counted. Thomas Reed — H.W. Brands

He had always thought that death was black nothingness, but he had not counted on being awake for it. — Kay Kenyon

At the heart of Vonnegut's voice is a humility my earnest young self didn't feel comfortable with: In it, I heard evidence of real humiliation. War really was hell, with hell being the place where whatever you normally counted on or leaned on was taken from you, absolutely. Bill Pilgrim is a skinny virginal dork, and when he gets to war, war leaps on his skinny dorkitude and devastates him unglamorously, and haunts him ever after. — George Saunders

Today women have the rights and equality our Victorian sisters could only dream of, and with those privileges comes the responsibility of standing up and being counted. — Sara Sheridan

She wondered if it counted as being good if you did the good thing for purely selfish reasons. Probably not, but who cared. What was important was what you did, not how you felt. — Emily Gould

Security was a mirage; being
tied down hardly counted when the other end of the rope had unraveled. — Jodi Picoult

In a perfect world, I don't think it [one's sexual orientation] is anyone else's business, but I do think there is value in standing up and being counted. — Anderson Cooper

Another California study counted 30,000 substance abusers who are pregnant are White woman. So, The Wire paints the picture of drug addiction, drug dealing, and drug abuse as being a specifically a Black issue. — Ishmael Reed

He felt the
way he imagined an angel must feel during its celebrated dance on the head of
a pin whilst being counted by philosophers. — Douglas Adams

What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap of freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again. — Albert Camus

Eenie, meenie, minie, mo is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is a rare surviving link with the very distant past. It not only gives us a fragmentary image of how children were being amused at the time Stonehenge was built, but tells us something about how their elders counted and thought and ordered their speech. — Bill Bryson

But Teia had a superpower that no one had counted on: she was completely paranoid. She had thought she was being followed a hundred times since she'd started working for the Order, so she'd figured out a thing or two. One, she was a paranoid mess. Two, she was pretty good at it. — Brent Weeks

My leaps of faith had also taught me this already. When the money stopped, it was usually because I was focusing on that fear of lack, so I received more lack. When I focused on the beauty of the day, counted my blessings and worked towards whatever I was being guided to do, what I needed would flow my way. — Bronnie Ware

One couple described the effects as being, "dated hard, married quick, and then ignored." They got into church alright, but the church never got into them; they were let in easily enough, but they never felt they were counted on. — Sue Mallory

[For men] to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism numbered with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes - this, nature bade not, - this, God blesses not, - this, humanity for no long time is able to endure. — John Ruskin

Maybe I should have gone back to Weight Watchers and tried harder to lose my luscious hips and overlarge ass. If I'd known it might keep me from being abducted by aliens, you bet I would have counted points until Doomsday. It's — Evangeline Anderson

Even thought she saw tattoos everywhere, they continued to fascinate her. How bizarre to be branded like a box of cereal. Didn't people mind being counted as just one more product on a shelf? There had to be more to a person than that. — Suzanne Weyn

If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering - insofar as rough comparisons can be made - of any other being. So the limit of sentience is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others. To mark this boundary by some other characteristic like intelligence or rationality would be to mark it in an arbitrary manner. Why not choose some other characteristic, like skin color? — Peter Singer

He frequently observed, as he walked out, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he stood in a shop in Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable face among them. — Jane Austen

It wasn't that Harry had gone down the wrong path, it wasn't that the road to sanity lay somewhere outside of science. But reading science papers hadn't been enough. All the cognitive psychology papers about known bugs in the human brain and so on had helped, but they hadn't been sufficient. He'd failed to reach what Harry was starting to realise was a shockingly high standard of being so incredibly, unbelievably rational that you actually started to get things right,as opposed to having a handy language in which to describe afterwards everything you'd just done wrong. Harry could look back now and apply ideas like 'motivated cognition' to see where he'd gone astray over the last year. That counted for something, when it came to being saner in the future. That was better than having no idea what he'd done wrong. But that wasn't yet being the person who could pass through Time's narrow keyhole, the adult form whose possibility Dumbledore had been instructed by seers to create. — Eliezer Yudkowsky