Best Tobias Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes it seems like if you open up the door to reality and invite it in, it will just come flowing. — Tobias Lindholm

I'm not abnegation, I'm not dauntless, I am Divergent — Veronica Roth

There is not room to swing a cat. — Tobias Smollett

You think giving you a hug would give away too much?" he says.
"You know," I say. "I really don't care."
I stand on my tiptoes and press my lips to his.
It is the best moment of my life. — Veronica Roth

I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story. — Tobias Wolff

Writing is all a lottery
I have been a loser by the works of the greatest men of the age. — Tobias Smollett

truth is, I look upon both candidates in the same light; and should think myself a traitor to the constitution of my country, if I voted for either. If every elector would bring the same consideration home to his conscience, we should not have such reason to exclaim against the venality of pts.5 But we are all a pack of venal and corrupted rascals; so lost to all sense of honesty, and all tenderness of character, that, in a little time, I am fully persuaded, nothing will be infamous but virtue and public-spirit. — Tobias Smollett

I open the door to the fear landscape room and flip open the small black box that was in my back pocket to see the syringes inside. This is the box I have always used, padded around the needles; it is a sign of something sick inside me, or something brave. — Veronica Roth

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown. — Tobias Hill

The best thing I have are 5 percent bonds from 1780, denominated from $1 to $20. As far as I can tell, they are obligations from the United States of America, so I should be able to walk down to the Federal Reserve and redeem the uncanceled ones. With 217 years of accrued interest, for a $20 bond, that's about $800,000. — Andrew Tobias

The great Cham of literature. (Samuel Johnson) — Tobias Smollett

The practical man demands an appearance of reality at least. Always dealing in the concrete, he regards mathematical terms not as symbols or thought but as images of reality. A system acceptable to the mathematician because of its inner consistency may appear to the practical man to be full of contradictions because of the incomplete manner in which it represents reality. — Tobias Dantzig

I keep finding myself stifled by the company of others and then crippled by loneliness when I leave them. I am terrified and I don't even know of what, because I have lost everything already. — Veronica Roth

I was a writer for 'New York' magazine. I had been to business school, but what did I know? Still, everybody from the receptionists on up to the editor would ask me what they should do with their money. — Andrew Tobias

Alice Oswald. With Hughes and Heaney gone, people are looking around for the best British and Irish poets. Oswald is one of our finest. — Tobias Hill

My mother - she's a good old classic Northern European socialist - she's totally wonderful, but she raised me up believing that rich people have stolen their money from poor people. — Tobias Lindholm

In 2007 and 2008, the first two Danish ships were hijacked. I started to research it. I've had the idea of writing in this arena for a long time, but I could never find the angle of what kind of story. — Tobias Lindholm

E felt no more than a boy again-but a very well-versed boy who couldn't help thinking of the scene described by these old words, surely the most beautiful words written or said: His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him. — Tobias Wolff

Your powers of deductive reasoning are stunning," spits Tobias. "Consider me awed. — Veronica Roth

I had never seen such sorrow; it appalled me. And I was even more appalled by her attempts to overcome it, because they so plainly, pathetically failed and in failing opened up a view of the world I had only begun to suspect, where wounds did not heal, and things did not work out for the best — Tobias Wolff

The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. So many of the things in our world lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it's one of the affirming arts. A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act. — Tobias Wolff

She wanted to cry because she had hit Tobias when he was trying to be kind. She wanted to cry for herself. Most of all she wanted to cry for her father. But the pain was too fierce for tears. It burnt them to ash. — Ellen Renner

I'll have to keep looking for more of them, more brief moments of freedom in a world that refuses to allow it. — Veronica Roth

With any character, you want the audience to at least empathize. — Tobias Segal

Man's natural life span, 75 to 90 years or so, has not increased. It is the number of us who manage to attain it that has increased. — Andrew Tobias

Summers are the best. And I figured summer was my best time for meeting someone, too, because in the summer people are looking for someone to snuggle up with for the winter. And because in the summer I could take off my shirt. — Andrew Tobias

You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels. — Tobias Wolff

When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever — Tobias Wolff

I try to help people become the best possible editors of their own work, to help them become conscious of the things they do well, of the things they need to look at again, of the wells of material they have not even begun to dip their buckets into. — Tobias Wolff

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels. — Tobias Wolff

I'm a survivor, I said. But I didn't think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary. — Tobias Wolff

Keep your mouth shut around me," he says, his voice low, "or I will do this again, only next time, I'll shove it right through your esophagus."
"That's enough," Evelyn says. Edward drops the fork and releases Peter. Then he walks across the room and sits next to the person who called him "Eddie" a moment before.
"I don't know if you know this," Tobias says, "but Edward is a little unstable."
"I'm getting that," I say.
"That Drew guy, who helped Peter perform that butter-knife maneuver," Tobias says. "Apparently when he got kicked out of Dauntless, he tried to join the same group of factionless Edward was a part of. Notice that you haven't seen Drew anywhere."
"Did Edward kill him?" I say.
"Nearly," Tobias says. "Evidently that's why that other transfer--Myra, I think her name was?--left Edward. Too gentle to bear it. — Veronica Roth

Someday, if we won, if humanity survived, we'd be in the history books. Me and Jake and Rachel and Cassie and Tobias and Ax. They'd be household names, like generals from World War II or the Civil War. Patton and Eisenhower, Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee. Kids would study us in school. Bored, probably.
And then the teacher would tell the story of Marco. I'd be a part of history. What I was about to do. Some kid would laugh. Some kid would say, "Cold, man. That was really cold."
I had to do it, kid. It was a war. It's the whole point, you stupid, smug, smirking little jerk! Don't you get it?
It was the whole point. We hurt the innocent in order to stop the evil. Innocent Hork-Bajir. Innocent Taxxons. Innocent human-Controllers. How else to stop the Yeerks? How else to win?
No choice, you punk. We did what we had to do.
"Cold, man. The Marco dude? He was just cold. — Katherine Applegate

Since I was a kid. I had this series by Ballantine Books about the history of World Wars I and II. In my 20s, it was the Vietnam War literature of novelists like Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, and Tobias Wolff, and then nonfiction such as "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan and "The Best and Brightest" by David Halberstam . Those are the two best histories of Vietnam. — George Packer

Judgments and secrets are what make a good novel. — Tobias Hill

Everyone has experienced alienation - at some point you go through a moment where you say: "I just want to be left alone." And what is the ultimate point of being alone? - it's dying, of course. — Tobias Segal

I am not Tobias Eaton, not anymore, never again. I am Dauntless. — Veronica Roth

I was a sitting duck myself, and Arthur had a map of my nerves. — Tobias Wolff

There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody. — Tobias Wolff

I regret ... " Tobias tilts his head, and sighs. "I regret my choice."
"What Choice?"
"Dauntless," he says. "I was born Abnegation. I was planning on leaving Dauntless, and becoming factionless. But I met her, and ... I felt like maybe I could make something more of my decision."
Her. — Veronica Roth

I think for my part one half of the nation is mad - and the other not very sound. — Tobias Smollett

Tobias wasn't entirely sure what happened next. All of a sudden everyone was in motion, and Tobias hit the carpet behind the couch face down with one arm wrenched behind his back. "Get the light, Phan! Light!" Noah barked, planting a knee in Tobias' back to keep him down. Tobias sighed, fighting the instinct to move; Noah would break his arm. "This really isn't my night," he said. ~ after Tobias sneaks up on Noah & Phan in the dark while they're watching a horror flick — Chris Owen

They were no more than steaks served up to portly politicians who controlled the personnel departments of the TV stations. (Showgirls in Italy) — Tobias Jones

A piece of writing is a dangerous thing," he said. "It can change your life. — Tobias Wolff

Nobody wants campaign finance reform more than me. It would save me a fortune. — Andrew Tobias

In the history of culture the discovery of zero will always stand out as one of the greatest single achievements of the human race. — Tobias Dantzig

Tobias took the photograph. At least, that's what I saw. Most likely I still had the photograph in my hand, but I couldn't feel it there, now I perceived Tobias holding it. It's strange, the way the mind can change perception. — Brandon Sanderson

He holds my face in both hands and kisses me back. I press into the distance between us until it is gone, crushing the secrets we have kept and the suspicions we have harbored-for good, I hope. — Veronica Roth

Did you just make a joke, Tris? We should have you on painkillers more often if your going to start cracking jokes. — Veronica Roth

I guess I always knew there was something wrong with me, but I thought it was because of my father, or my mother, and the pain they bequeathed to me like a family heirloom, handed down from generation to generation.
- Tobias Eaton — Veronica Roth

The tiles in the Merciless Mart are always black and white, and here they are in a checkered pattern. If I unfocus my eyes, I see exactly what the Candor don't believe in - gray. — Veronica Roth

Denmark is a small nation of five million people, but our economy is completely dependent on our commercial fleet. Every family has some connection to it. — Tobias Lindholm