Chose The Wrong Quotes & Sayings

Was it worth while to lay
with infinite exertion
a roof I can't live under?
- All those blueprints,
closings of gaps,
measurings, calculations?
A life I didn't choose
chose me: even
my tools are the wrong ones
for what I have to do.
I'm naked, ignorant,
a naked man fleeing
across the roofs
who could with a shade of difference
be sitting in the lamplight
against the cream wallpaper
reading - not with indifference
about a naked man
fleeing across the roofs. — Adrienne Rich

I wonder where we are going," I said.
"Wherever the way is going," Exi replied calmly.
"But where do you suppose the way is going?"
"Wherever we go."
"That doesn't really make sense, does it?"
"Oh, yes. Quite good sense."
"Why?"
"Do you know any method by which you can go way and your path another? Not the path, but your path?"
"Well-" I hesitated. "Well, if you put it that way, I guess not. But what about crossroads? Couldn't you choose the wrong one?"
"I suppose you could. However, if it was the wrong way you chose, it would still be your way, wouldn't it?"
"Yes," I answered, "yes, it probably would. — Sheila Moon

She wanted to say, I am made of smoke. My mind is smoke, my thoughts are smoke, I am all smoke and only smoke. This body is a garment I put on, which by my magic art I have made capable of functioning as a human body functions, it's so biologically perfect that it can conceive children and pop them out in threes, fours and fives. Yet I am not of this body and could, if I chose, inhabit another woman, or an antelope, or a gnat. Aristotle was wrong, for I have lived for aeons, and altered by body when I chose, like a garment of which I had grown tired. The mind and the body are two, she wanted to say, but she knew it would disappoint him to be disagreed with, so she held her tongue. — Salman Rushdie

I should never have left you. I was caught between fealty to my world and fealty to my blood. I chose wrong. I was a king. I held the knife. I acted as a king should. But I did not act as family should. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

He might make wrong choices." "Oh." Jonas was silent for a minute. "Oh, I see what you mean. It wouldn't matter for a newchild's toy. But later it does matter, doesn't it? We don't dare to let people make choices of their own." "Not safe?" The Giver suggested. "Definitely not safe," Jonas said with certainty. "What if they were allowed to choose their own mate? And chose wrong? "Or what if," he went on, almost laughing at the absurdity, "they chose their own jobs?" "Frightening, isn't it?" The Giver said. Jonas chuckled. "Very frightening. I can't even imagine it. We really have to protect people from wrong choices." "It's safer." "Yes," Jonas agreed. "Much safer. — Lois Lowry

You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing. — Umberto Eco

What was wrong with me? Why could I not just flip the switch and see all the brightness ahead if only I chose the correct path? Or rather, why could I see the correct path but not choose to tread upon it? — Hanne Arts

Where are you going?"
"Out. Like you."
He raised an eyebrow, but he didn't press for more information. "One should always make one's own mistakes, instead of the mistakes of others, amira."
"Out like me, then."
"Dressed like that?"
"And what's wrong with it?"
"It looks like you chose the pieces by throwing darts. And you are terrible at darts. Besides, it's much too short." He pointed vaguely toward my ankles and winked. "The whole world can see the top of your foot. You look like a hussy."
I grabbed my skirt and flashed him my knees. He pretended to swoon. "Don't worry. This is late Victorian, not early. More permissive. — Heidi Heilig

Don't forget, when you refuse to make right choices, you have already chosen to live the wrong way! Indecision is a decision to live wrongly! — Israelmore Ayivor

Today's political leaders demonstrate their low opinion of the public with every social law they pass. They believe that, if given the right to chose, the citizenry will probably make the wrong choice. Legislators do not think any more in terms of persuading people; they feel the need to force their agenda on the public at the point of a bayonet and the barrel of a gun, in the name of the IRS, the SEC, the FDA, the DEA, the EPA, or a multitude of other ABCs of government authority. — Mark Skousen

Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn't exactly overlap with my friends'. — Robyn Schneider

Today, a lot of people, businesses, countries and even churches have their dreams sleeping in the belly of the shark where they are starved because they chose the wrong path although they know the right destination! The consequence is "becoming uncomfortable" because you refuse to let your dreams go to let "Niviveh"! — Israelmore Ayivor

Human females, they're kind of crazy during this time aren't they?
If you chose to believe the stories written by male writers.
They heard a bang and thump from the kitchen. Followed by Meg yelling at something.
That many males can't be wrong. — Anne Bishop

When the Son of God chose to submit to this trial in his own person, he became an example to all believers, so that they may carefully avoid falling into Satan's snares by a wrong use of Scripture. And — John Calvin

The things you did, you know they were not right. But that does not mean you are not capable of doing right. It only means that you chose to do wrong. — R.J. Palacio

Selflessness involves giving up your self. You become a martyr. Like the Hindu kamikaze warriors. These Japanese Hindus chose to give up their lives, and they were killed if they didn't. Imagine what their families felt. One day you have a father, and next, you're watching him fly a plane into a ship on Pearl Harbor on television. Those kids didn't do anything wrong. They just lived in an evil country. The axis of evil. That sort of evil is beyond anything you or I will experience in our lifetimes. So be glad. Be glad we live in the US of A. Be glad we get to choose, with our freedoms. Now get out there and fight! — Bill Konigsberg

If a woman chose the wrong person, he was always going to be the wrong person: that was all. The most capable therapist in the world wouldn't be able to do much more than negotiate the treaty. — Jean Hanff Korelitz

For a long time I thought I should be a civil engineer. That seemed to be the only thing worth doing, and I chose the wrong subjects at A-level. I read all the sciences to start with, and then had to admit, 'This isn't what I want to do' and changed course. — Ian Hislop

A mother who is not everything for her children: a friend, a teacher, a confidant, a source of joy and founded pride, inducement and soothing, reconciliator, judge and forgiver, that mother obviously chose the wrong job. — Joseph Goebbels

Not many years before the Happening, one of your country's largest religious bodies officially declared that their book was holier than their God, thus simultaneously and corporately breaking several commandments of their own religion, particularly the first one. Of course they liked the book better! It was full of magic and contradictions that they could quote to reinforce their bigoted and hateful opinions, as I well know, for I chose many parts of it from among the scrolls and epistles that were lying around in caves here and there. They're correct that a god picked out the material; they just have the wrong god doing it.
(The small god in Ch. 44) — Sheri S. Tepper

I took an oath June. I am still bound by that oath. I will die with honor for sacrificing everything I have-everything-for my country.. And yet, Day is a legend, while I am to be executed." His voice finally breaks with all his anger and inner torment, the injustice he feels. "It makes no sense."
I stand up. Behind me, guards move toward the cell door. "You're wrong," I say sadly. "It makes perfect sense."
"Why?"
"Because Day chose to walk in the light." I turn my back on him for the last time. The door opens; the cell's bars make way for the hall, a new rotation of prison guards, freedom. "And so did Metias. — Marie Lu

He had a choice,' I said. 'He could have spent his days helping old ladies across the street. He could have volunteered in the library. I expect they have a library here. He could have raised funds for Africa, or wherever they need funds these days. He could have done a whole lot of good things. But he didn't. He chose not to. He chose to spend his days extorting money and hurting people. Then finally he opened the wrong door, and what came out at him was his problem, not mine. Plus he was useless. A waste of good food. Too stupid to live.'
'Stupidity isn't a capital crime. And there's no death penalty here, anyway.'
'There is now. — Lee Child

You said he was a soldier. You don't suppose ... ?"
"Oh, Gods." Ignata blinked. "You think something could be wrong down there?"
All of them looked at William, who chose this precise moment to slide the wet shirt back on his back, which required him to flex, raising his arms.
"That would be a shame," Cerise murmured. — Ilona Andrews

But Marge, what if we chose the wrong religion? Each week we just make God madder and madder. — Matt Groening

These were the world's first people. Everything they did, every action and decision, was entirely new, without precedent. They had no larger society to turn to, no examples of how to behave. They only had the Almighty to tell them right from wrong. And like all children, if His commands ran counter to their desires, sometimes they chose not to listen. And then they learned that there are consequences to one's actions. — Helene Wecker

But I learned more than you know from Owen Paris. I learned that trying to live up to imagined expectations is a waste of energy. I learned that nothing can replace the time I spend with my daughter every day. I learned much too late that his way of loving me was just his way. I learned too late that he loved me at all. He chose his career over his children. He left us with you, and you are a great mom. But every day he wasn't there was another day I spent wondering what I had done wrong and why he didn't care enough to be with me. "My children are never going to wonder that. I'm going to be there for every birthday, every school assembly, every science fair, every bad grade, every fight on the playground, every good-night kiss, every messy, hard, frustrating, perfect moment of it. — Kirsten Beyer

I also realized that the philosophers, far from ridding me of my vain doubts, only multiplied the doubts that tormented me and failed to remove any one of them. So I chose another guide and said, Let me follow the Inner Light; it will not lead me so far astray as others have done, or if it does it will be my own fault, and I shall not go so far wrong if I follow my own illusions as if I trusted to their deceits. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

There are two important trees in the Garden of Eden: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. We chose the wrong one. The fruit of the Tree of Life would have given us immortality. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge informed us that we were nude, which, as knowledge goes, is pretty low down the list of amazing facts. — Mark Forsyth

You can be angry and pissed off at the coach and put your head down and pout. Or you can rise above it, respect the decision, but also know that you're going to go and work that much harder and prove everybody wrong. And that's the road that I chose. — Carli Lloyd

Do you remember the books from our childhood? Those were you could decide yourself what the character should do next?
I always loved those books, getting to decide what will happen, being responsible for it.
But did you ever decided for something, flipped to the page, read it and then thought: "No, I don't want this to happen!" And then you went back to where it all went wrong and just took a different path.
It was always so easy with those books, if you didn't like what was happening you just chose a different path, like pressing rewind till it makes sense again and then hit play.
It's not like I am always unhappy with my words, actions or decisions in a situation, but I can't stop wondering how everything would be right now if I had said something different at some point.
I guess I will never know but it makes me question my words, decisions and actions right now, because what if I chose wrong and then I don't get what I wish for because of one word or one step? — Lena Goetz

You are the moon that breaks the night . You are the fear that I hate to fight. Times are wrong in all that is done. My treasure is love that I give to only one. Cherrish the treasures given to your heart and never let anything hurt from the start. You chose your path so accept and believe, that peace love and light are needed to breathe. — Peace Gypsy

Well, let's face it, you're not stupid. You knew there were a lot of things wrong in the relationship, you just chose to ignore them because there were so many good things you didn't want to give up. Now, you're at the point in your life where you're strong enough to give up the good stuff. You're strong enough to expect more from your life. I'm proud of you for that. Most women aren't that strong. They're so terrified of being alone that they stay with the wrong guy, rather than risk loneliness waiting for the right guy. — Kim Gruenenfelder

Maybe God doesn't care if we get all dressed up and sit in the pew every Sunday, as Diana believes. Instead, maybe God comes to us through men like Sloth, watching over us as we make our own decisions. Maybe God has always been with me. Opening doors, leading me to opportunities, letting me choose my own path, and loving me even when I chose the wrong one. Never giving up on me. Knowing all along that I am on a journey. That I must find my own way to Him. Maybe River was rights. Maybe God does still believe in me. — Julie Cantrell

India's head ached. Insomnia was still her most attentive, cruelest lover, demanding and possessing her selfishly whenever it chose to do so. Light-heartedness was beyond her today. A man of middling quality was trying to marry her, and there was something wrong with her father's voice on the phone. — Salman Rushdie

I, on the other hand, am very concerned about how word choice will affect my readers. For instance, in the description of Genesis, I chose the term 'good and evil' instead of 'right and wrong', which are basically two same terms. I wanted to use 'right and wrong' because it definitely will ignite more controversies than 'good and evil', but I chose to use the latter because I was afraid of the social influence that can come from reading my book, and although there is no adult material at all in the book, I could risk getting my book banned. — Andreas Laurencius

He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn't even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he'd carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn't know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she'd gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he'd chosen for her was an idiot. — Hanif Kureishi

There were two choices in life. Survive or succumb. And most people weren't even conscious of the path they chose. Because they chose for all the wrong reasons. Love, principles, dreams, desire. The world hadn't changed. It had always been survival of the fittest. — Claire Merle

Seven times I have despised my soul:
The first time when I saw her being meek that she might attain height.
The second time when I saw her limping before the crippled.
The third time when she was given to choose between the hard and the easy, and she chose the easy.
The fourth time when she committed a wrong, and comforted herself that others also commit wrong.
The fifth time when she forbode for weakness, and attributed her patience to strength.
The sixth time when she despised the ugliness of a face, and knew not that it was one of her own masks.
And the seventh time when she sang a song of praise, and deemed it a virtue. — Kahlil Gibran

The biggest thing I've found since I left the game - and I'm glad I chose to leave rather than being sacked - is that so many people are in football for the wrong reasons. Not because they love the game, but because they smell money. — Graham Taylor

There was something liberating and terrifying about the first day on a new job. In any new assignment, Bobbie had always had the unsettling feeling that she was in over her head, that she wouldn't know how to do any of the things they would ask her to do, that she would dress wrong or say the wrong thing, or that everyone would hate her. But no matter how strong that feeling was, it was overshadowed by the sense that with a new job came the chance to totally recreate herself in whatever image she chose, that - at least for a little while - her options were infinite. — James S.A. Corey

Even if you tell yourself "Today I'm going to drink coffee the wrong way ... from a dirty boot." Even that would be right, because you chose to drink coffee from that boot.
Because you can do nothing wrong. You are always right. Even when you say, "I'm such an idiot, I'm so wrong ... " you're right. You're right about being wrong. You're right even when you're an idiot.
No matter how stupid your idea, you're doomed to be right because it's yours. — Chuck Palahniuk

The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach? [...] Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn't all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn't accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it's time to consider whether there's something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away. — Thomas Frank

She eyes me. 'What is this all about?'
It's my turn to shrug, upsetting the rocks on my back. 'I don't know. Girl talk. I mean, you can have any guy you want, so why don't you just pick one?'
Priscilla doesn't answer at first. I'm glad I chose this moment: she's actually pinned down and cannot run away. Finally, she says, 'If I can have any guy I want, I'd like to have every guy I want.'
'What do you mean?
She gives me an exasperated look. 'I'm only seventeen, Skye. I'm not looking to settle down just yet.' She probably misunderstands my shocked expression, because she adds, 'I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong or anything, but it's just not me, you know? — Fabio Bueno

I will do you one last favour, in the name and memory of the figment you have replaced. I will clarify a misapprehension of yours. Circumstances did not conspire against me. I was not led into anything, nor did I fall. I chose my life and my course. I chose to do wrong in the hope that right might come of it. I regret it. I would choose differently now. But the choice was mine. Deny that, falsify it, tinsel it over with pious, pitying justification, and you deny everything I am and every scrap of what little good I have been able to do in my life. Good or bad, give me credit for what I have done. I would rather go honestly to Hell, admitting that I leaped knowingly into error and folly, than enter into the sweetest Heaven men can dream of by whining that I had been pushed. — Steven Brust

I'm not the girl men chose.
I'm the girl who's charming and funny and then drives home wondering what she did wrong. I'm the girl who meets someone halfway decent and then fills in the gaps in his character with my own imagination, only to be shocked when he's not the man I thought he was.
I'm the girl who hides who she really is for fear I'll fall short. — Liza Palmer

Helene, why did you even choose this field of study? Philosophy? The thing is, you double majored in psychology and philosophy in your undergraduate studies, but then you chose to pursue your doctorate in philosophy rather than psychology. There's a reason for that."
"Because, I like ... " I scratched my head as I let myself drop back into the sofa cushions, and then I sighed. "I like that nothing is black and white. I like that I can let my mind go and explore even the most basic of concepts as though my thoughts and feelings are as important as ... as ... Schopenhauer and Hume. I don't have to accept that there's a right and wrong answer. I can believe and feel that there are so many more shades of truth. — Elizabeth Finn

I always thought that if you gave people all the information, they'd do the right thing, you know? Not always, maybe, but usually. More often than when they chose to do the wrong thing anyway. — James S.A. Corey

Charles could feel himself sagging with middle-aged defeat, a loser who lacked the hot-blooded need to wrestle America to the ground and take her milk money, who never had the balls to flip his father's shame into a triumphant empire, who marched obediently towards death and hid from life and always chose the wrong path. No. Not yet. He was still Charles Fucking Wang and he would lead the way out of the wilderness. — Jade Chang

Raven had been shunned and abandoned throughout his life. Friends often came and went without a word or worse, they toyed with his emotions and shared his secrets with those he chose to distrust. His loneliness was inevitable and his secrets were damaging enough. Through all of his largely brief but emotionally involved friendships and infatuations, the depression and the darkness of his past, there had been one place to which he could go for solitude - either in thought or in person - and he never shared the knowledge of its existence or its secrets with anyone. That place dwelled within him even all of these years since the summer when he was nine and all that could ever have gone wrong, did. — Amanda M. Lyons

Losing your faith in a world where God is all around you is a precarious business. When God shows his face on a daily basis to your friends and neighbors, it is, on some level, impossible to stop believing in Him. Instead i felt that God chose to exclude me from His world. Since i was the only one to lose faith, to stop hearing Christ's voice, i thought perhaps it was my fault that Roy had left us. I thought i was being punished for some unknown sin. I had learned early in my Catholic career that one could sin silently in one's heart. One could even sin without ever discovering what one had done or why it was wrong. What had i done, i asked myself, to make God disappear and take Roy with Him. — Alison Smith

You get respect in society if you are aggressive. If you fight then people respect you. If you fight back, people like you for that as well. When Ive been beaten up, if Ive been in a pub doing nothing wrong, the fact I chose not to fight back, that I would never throw a punch back, people say Im weak. I dont think thats a weak thing at all. I think why should I descend to their level? If Ive done nothing wrong, throwing a punch back makes me as bad and corrupt as them. As evil as them, as stupid as them. — Richey Edwards

Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to. — Condoleezza Rice

Time in a bookstore is a selection process. You touch the spines, one by one, until your finger lands on the desired work. Marinovich calls this accidental research, because, at times, your finger slips and you land on the wrong book. That wrong book can ultimately be the most important book in your life -- as if, for once, it was the book that chose you. — Saskia De Rothschild

He observed how his feet chose each wrong turning, working against his navigational instincts, circling and repeating, and bringing on a feverish detachment. Someone older than himself paced inside his body, someone stronger too, cut loose from the common bonds of sex, of responsibility. Looking back he would remember a brief moment when time felt mute and motionless. This hour of solitary wandering seemed a gift, and part of the gift was an old greedy grammar flapping in his ears: lost, more lost, utterly lost. He felt the fourteen days of his marriage collapsing backward and becoming an invented artifact, a curved space he must learn to fit into. Love was not protected. No, it wasn't. It sat out in the open like anything else. — Carol Shields

Which one's in the main theater?"

"I don't know. I just work here part-time to pay for my organic breathing lessons."

"Do you have any dice?" I asked, and then realized I was going about this all wrong. This was quantum theory not Newtonian. It didn't matter which theater I chose or which seat I sat down in. This was a delayed-choice experiment and David was already in flight. — Connie Willis

There is no right or wrong apart from what you decide. Who you chose to defend deserves to be defended simply because you chose them. You are the Fire Lord. What you chose, by definition, is right. — Gene Luen Yang

And Casaubon had done a wrong to Dorothea in marrying her. A man was bound to know himself better than that, and if he chose to grow grey crunching bones in a cavern, he had no business to be luring a girl into his companionship. 'It is the most horrible of virgin sacrifices,' said Will; and he painted to himself what were Dorothea's inward sorrows as if he had been writing a choric wail. — George Eliot

Dan is not the right guy or the wrong guy. He is just my guy. My husband. The one I chose on the day I chose him, and right now, I plan to go on choosing him for the rest of my life. — Kate Kerrigan

A life I didn't choose
chose me: even
my tools are the wrong ones
for what I have to do. — Adrienne Rich

You go first," Four says. Eric shrug. "Edward." Four leans against the door frame and nods. The moonlight makes his eyes bright. He scans the group of transfer initiates briefly, without calculation and says, "I want the Stiff." ...
Heat rushes into my cheeks and I don't know whether to be angry at the people laughing at me or flattered by the fact that he chose me first. "Got something to prove?" asks Eric, with his trademark smirk. "Or you just picking the weak ones, so that if you lose, you'll have someone to blame it on?" Four shrugs. "Something like that." Angry. I should be angry. I scowl at my hands. Whatever Four's strategy is, it's based on the idea that I am weaker than the other initiates. And it gives me a bitter taste in my mouth. i have to prove him wrong
I have to. — Veronica Roth

But no matter how clearly I saw what I was doing, I would go on doing it, as though I simply allowed my shame to sit there alongside my need to do it, one separate from the other. I often chose to do the wrong thing and feel bad about it rather than to do the right thing, if the wrong thing was what I wanted. — Lydia Davis