Quotes & Sayings About Being One Person In A Big World

I was a 36C or D, and at 5' 1', I knew that being a small person with big boobs standing in front of an audience was not going to be easy. It would be really hard to get people to pay attention to me without mocking me. Getting a breast reduction to prepare for my career was no different from people who work to get good grades to get into a good college to get into a good graduate school to get a good job. I went down to a B cup, and it was the best thing in the whole world. — Janeane Garofalo

I stared so long that I got to seeing them as being dark, ugly sins in my body, smelling and dirty, but my touch face showed that I didn't give a damn. I was the toughest person in the whole world. And then inside the outline of my body a devil's face slowly took shape. It came to my chest, a dark, ugly thing with big lips that looked hot around yellow pointed teeth, eyeing me in a friednly way, as though it had been feeding on what was inside me and was trying to show how pleased it was. — Ian Cross

I LOST MY OWN BOY, Treelore, right before I started waiting on Miss Leefolt. He was twenty-four years old. The best part of a person's life. It just wasn't enough time living in this world. He had him a little apartment over on Foley Street. Seeing a real nice girl name Frances and I spec they was gone get married, but he was slow bout things like that. Not cause he looking for something better, just cause he the thinking kind. Wore big glasses and reading all the time. He even start writing his own book, bout being a colored man living and working in Mississippi. — Kathryn Stockett

While big corporations make huge, tax-free profits, taxes for the everyday working person skyrocket. While politicians take free trips around the world, those same politicians cut back food stamps for the poor. While politicians increase their salaries, millions of people are being laid off. This city is on the brink of bankruptcy, and yet hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on this trial. I do not understand a government so willing to spend millions of dollars on arms, to explore outer space, even the planet Jupiter, and at the same time close down day care centers and fire stations. — Assata Shakur

We do not feel that ordinarily, do we? What we feel, instead, is an identification of ourselves with our ideas of ourselves - I would rather say, with our image of ourselves. That is the person, or the ego. You play a role; you identify with that role. I play a role called Alan Watts. And I know very well that it is a big act. I can play some other roles besides Alan Watts if necessary, but I find this one is best for making a living. But I assure you that is a mask and I do not take it seriously. The idea of my being a kind of guru, or savior of the world just breaks me up, because I know me. Besides, it is very difficult to be holy, in the ordinary sense. — Alan W. Watts

Every kid has it tough. Being a little person in a big world with nobody taking you very seriously is tough. — Barbara Kingsolver

The beauty myth posited to women a false choice: Which will I be, sexual or serious? We must reject that false and forced dilemma. Men's sexuality is taken to be enhanced by their seriousness; to be at the same time a serious person and a sexual being is to be fully human. Let's turn on those who offer this devil's bargain and refuse to believe that in choosing one aspect of the self we must thereby forfeit the other. In a world in which women have real choices, the choices we make about our appearance will be taken at last for what they really are: no big deal. — Naomi Wolf

As women of the western world, we see our sisters in other lands being raped, maimed and even executed simply for trying to exercise the most basic freedoms, such as taking a bus alone or wearing a bright red sweater. And when we look at our own world, we see that it too still lacks equality for the sexes.
It's a terrible thing to go through one's entire lifetime not getting to do all the things we dream of doing just because others say we're not permitted to do them, and to know that they will hurt us if we try.
But far, far worse than that is when there's not a thing or a person outside that's stopping us from living exactly as we wish, but we stop ourselves; internally we do not give ourselves permission, simply because we're too scared of what will happen if we dare. — PatriciaV. Davis

The world is changing because we're changing it. And that makes me understand, at least, what kind of person I'd like to be. A person can seek ways, whether big or small, to heal the world. That, to me, is spirituality and one's 'soul.' Not some disembodied eternal wishfulness but a way of being that, most days, I can work on. Life is like walking with a flashlight on a dark night. You can't see your destination, but each step illuminates the next few steps, and, taking one after another, you can get where you need to go. Only now, we'll need to quicken our pace if we are to avoid major upheaval in this century. It's up to us not just as individuals but as citizens of nations and of the world. — Carl Safina

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

Actually, it meant a great deal: a very great deal. You don't have to believe that God exists to see that a story in which God takes on human form is a very different story from one in which God creates a messenger and tells that messenger to take on human form. The Passion of the Christ is a different movie depending on whether you think the person being eviscerated is God or just some guy. Athanasius thought that it was God who hung on a cross for the world; Arius thought that it was a created being who was not God. This is not very little; this is very big. Granted, the Creeds put it in terms of Aristotelian theories about "substance" and "essence": but there isn't much sense in complaining that technical documents are written in technical language if you are not prepared to pick up a standard work and look up what the words mean. — Andrew Rilstone

What's wrong with the world," Nana explained, "is that people stopped listening to their hearts ...
"Not everybody stopped listening," she continued, "but enough people did to make a difference. We've go so much in this life that all we know how to do is want more. So we concentrate on the wrong things
things we can see
as being the measure of a person. We think if we can win something big or buy something snazzy it'll make us more than we are. Our hearts know that's not true, but the eyes are powerful. It's easier to fix on what we can see than listen to the still, small voice of a whispering heart."
Nana turned her eyes on me like a vet looking for fleas: "A heart will say amazing things if it's given half a chance. — Joan Bauer

There's such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won't be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children's. — James McBride

If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don't have to take it in. You don't have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. It's about the person who's being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird. If this were summed up on a bumper sticker, it would say: Don't own other people's crap. The world would be a better place if we all did that. — Cheryl Strayed

I guess they have to label someone the sexiest person in the world, and it is always someone who is on telly even if it's the weatherman. For a couple of years it was me and then it was someone else. It's nicer being the sexiest man than the most ugly man. I live with it, and I don't mind it, but I don't go around with a big smile on my face everyday. — Mads Mikkelsen

At some point, I figured that it would be more effective and far funnier to embrace the ugliest, most terrifying things in the world
the Holocaust, racism, rape, et cetera. But for the sake of comedy, and the comedian's personal sanity, this requires a certain emotional distance. It's akin to being a shrink or a social worker. you might think that the most sensitive, empathetic person would make the best social worker, but that person would end up being soup on the floor. It really takes someone strong
someone, dare I say, with a big fat wall up
to work in a pool of heartbreak all day and not want to fucking kill yourself. But adopting a persona at once ignorant and arrogant allowed me to say what I didn't mean, even preach the opposite of what I believed. For me, it was a funny way to be sincere. And like the jokes in a roast, the hope is that the genuine sentiment
maybe even a goodness underneath the joke (however brutal) transcends. — Sarah Silverman

It's just such a big commitment," Brandy says, "being a girl, you know. Forever."
Taking the hormones. For the rest of her life. The pills, the patches, the injections, for the rest of her life. And what if there was
someone, just one person who would love her, who could make her life happy, just the way she was, without the hormones and make-up and the clothes and shoes and surgery? She has to at least look around the world a little. — Chuck Palahniuk