Every First Time Quotes & Sayings

I go into every story thinking I'm going to fail. I think about that all the time - I think it's going to be terrible. Every story is like the first I've ever done. — Mary Ellen Mark

First of all, when I was making the decision, I never thought that Pittsburgh fans would want me back. Every time I played there, they were booing me every time I touched the puck. I didn't think it would be such a big deal that I didn't sign with Pittsburgh. — Jaromir Jagr

Starting isn't like that. Starting something is not an event; it's a series of events. You decide to walk to Cleveland. So you take a first step in the right direction. That's starting. You spend the rest of the day walking toward Cleveland, one step at a time, picking your feet up and putting them down. At the end of the day, twenty miles later, you stop at a hotel. And what happens the next morning? Either you quit the project or you start again, walking to Cleveland. In fact, every step is a new beginning. Sure, you're closer than you were yesterday or last week, but you're still ... — Seth Godin

E have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of physical effort have accumulated the means for luxury and leisure, culture has followed as naturally as vegetation grows in a rich and watered soil. To have become wealthy was the first necessity; a people too must live before it can philosophize. No doubt we have grown faster than nations usually have grown; and the disorder of our souls is due to the rapidity of our development. We are like youths disturbed and unbalanced, for a time, by the sudden growth and experiences of puberty. But soon our maturity will come; our minds will catch up with our bodies, our culture with our possessions. Perhaps there are greater souls than Shakespeare's, and greater minds than Plato's, waiting to be born. When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance. — Will Durant

If I could save time in a bottle The first thing that I'd like to do Is to save every day — Jim Croce

I want to be better every year, just like everyone else does. From what I learned from last year, I feel a lot more comfortable. I know the game and how it goes up here. You get in certain situations the first time, you really don't know what to expect. Now that I've been in them-and I've been in every situation possible last year-there's nothing new to come at me. — Ryan Zimmerman

I think, first of all, every time you want to play somebody who is real is always challenging and always scary, because you are given a responsibility of someone's real life. — Liya Kebede

Secretly in my heart, I believe food is a doorway to almost every dimension of our existence ... Food never was just food. From the time a cave person first came out from under a rock, food has been a little bit of everything: who we are spiritually as well as what keeps us alive. It's a gathering place, and in the best of all worlds it's possible that when people of one country sit down to eat another culture's food it will open their minds to the culture itself. Food is a doorway to understanding, and it can be as profound or as facile as you would like it to be. — Lynne Rossetto Kasper

Each time I arrived in a new city, I'd get lost in the streets and photograph everything that looked interesting, taking nearly a thousand photographs every day. After each day of shooting, I'd select 30 or 40 of my favorite photographs and post them on Facebook. I named the albums after my first impression of each city. — Brandon Stanton

When Topher took me to the animal shelter to pick out a pup, the lady said we didn't want That Dog because she was scrawny. But I knew from the first time I saw That Dog, she was meant to be mine. I hope every person in the world gets to have an experience so wondrous: the sweet tug at your heart when you look at a dog, and a dog looks at you, and you know you're meant to take care of each other. — Natalie Lloyd

I listen to music every day for study reasons, and I confess that I have very little knowledge of what is going on in the hit parades around the world. I have no prejudices for any kind of music genre, and I listen with pleasure to many songs on the radio that my children already know of by heart, while I hear them practically for the first time. — Andrea Bocelli

You can die of a broken heart
it's scientific fact
and my heart has been breaking since that very first day we met. I can feel it now, aching deep behind my rib cage the way it does every time we're together, beating a desperate rhythm: Love me. Love me. Love me. — Abby McDonald

Whenever you're in a relationship, you have that favorite song that reminds you of when you first got together or when you first kissed, and then every time you hear that song, it reminds you of that person. — Olly Murs

Your objective is to avoid being on a string.
The first step, I think, is to get over the fear of losing a man by confronting him. Just stop being afraid, already. The most successful people in this world recognize that taking chances to get what they want is much more productive than sitting around being too scared to take a shot. The same philosophy can be applied to dating: if putting your requirements on the table means you risk him walking away, it's a risk you have to take. Because that fear can trip you up every time; all too many of you let the guy get away with disrespecting you, putting in minimal effort and holding on to the commitment to you because you're afraid he's going to walk away and you'll be alone again. And we men? We recognize this and play on it, big time. — Steve Harvey

The truth is, Rosemary, that you are capable of anything. Good or bad. You always have been, and you always will be. Given the right push, you, too, could do horrible things. That darkness exists within all of us. You think every soldier who picked up a cutter gun was a bad person? No. She was just doing what the soldier next to her was doing, who was doing what the soldier next to her was doing, and so on and so on. And I bet most of them - not all, but most - who made it through the war spent a long time after trying to understand what they'd done. Wondering how they ever could have done it in the first place. Wondering when killing became so comfortable. — Becky Chambers

Jimmy Grants is my first stop every time I go home to Australia. They make the best souvlakis you have ever tasted. — Mallory Jansen

Every time I see you with sunbae, I always feel unhappy. This time the same thing happened. Why is it not me but another woman? This is not the first, but the second time. I'm always like this. Just like a fool. — Kim A-joong

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that's not really what happened - and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars? - Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants. — Junot Diaz

people's lives could also be told from front to back, one could wait until they ended and then, gradually, follow the stream back to the source, identifying the tributaries on the way and sailing up them too, aware that each one, even the smallest and feeblest, was, in its time and in itself, a major river, and in this slow, deliberate way, alert to every scintillation on the surface of the water, every bubble risen from the bottom, every sudden downward flurry, every stagnant stillness, reach the end of the narrative and place after the first of all moments the final full stop, and to take the same amount of time that the lives thus told had actually lasted. — Jose Saramago

The inextinguishable lesbian spark. You've surely heard about it? The one that was first ignited at Lesbos, because Sappho was so sad every time a young woman left the academy that she wrote her a poem. Fancy being sad because someone leaves! Perverted, that's what I call it. Don't you? — Gerd Brantenberg

I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia - that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives - and fail to find in it a strange riddle. We forget of what great intellectual accomplishments and of what complicated emotions a child of four years is capable. We really ought to wonder why the memory of later years has, as a rule, retained so little of these psychic processes, especially as we have every reason for assuming that these same forgotten childhood activities have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of the person, but that they have left a definite influence for all future time. — Sigmund Freud

When I hire musicians, I look for that first: every time they sit down do they go for it, you know? And do they try to learn the music and try to get inside the song whatever the tune is? Whether it's my originals or someone else's, it's just whether or not they're gonna play their hearts out, first and foremost. — Mike Stern

The very first thing I tell every intern on the first day is that their internship exists solely on their resume. As far as I am concerned, they are a full-time member of my team. For all the negative stereotypes about millennials, you would be astounded by how hard they work when they believe their contribution matters. — Jay Samit

Every time you used, it was a risk searching for a high just like the first time, a high you would never find again. — Bob Pastorella

The first glance at the pillow showed me a repulsive sentinel perched upon each end of it
cockroaches as large as peach leaves
fellows with long, quivering antennae and fiery, malignant eyes. They were grating their teeth like tobacco worms, and appeared to be dissatisfied about something. I had often heard that these reptiles were in the habit of eating off sleeping sailors' toe nails down to the quick, and I would not get in the bunk any more. I lay down on the floor. But a rat came and bothered me, and shortly afterward a procession of cockroaches arrived and camped in my hair. In a few moments the rooster was crowing with uncommon spirit and a party of fleas were throwing double somersaults about my person in the wildest disorder, and taking a bite every time they stuck. I was beginning to feel really annoyed. I got up and put my clothes on and went on deck.
The above is not overdrawn; it is a truthful sketch of inter-island schooner life. — Mark Twain

Prettiest thing I've ever seen."
"Gray,"
"In that getup, in your jeans and tees, in your bikini on the lawnmower, when I open my eyes in the morning and see you next to me, anytime I see you, that's what I think. First thing that comes to mind. Anytime. Every time. — Kristen Ashley

I believe that when a loved one has dementia, you experience many layers of grief.

The first wave of grief comes with the diagnosis. The realisation that the person who has supported you all your life, will no longer be able to do so, no matter how hard they try.

Grief the first time they struggle to remember your name or your relationship to each other.

Grief when you have to accept that you can no longer keep them at home.

Grief as they lose the ability to communicate, as another piece of the jigsaw is lost.

Grief every time they are afraid, agitated or confused. So much grief you don't think you can cope with anymore.

And then the overwhelming tidal wave of grief when they pass, when you would give anything to go back to the first wave of grief. — Emma Haslegrave

Every time a crime was committed by a Muslim, that person's faith was mentioned, regardless of its relevance. When a crime is committed by a Christian, do they mention his religion? ... When a crime is committed by a black man, it's mentioned in the first breath: 'An African American man was arrested today ... ' But what about German Americans? Anglo Americans? A white man robs a convenience store and do we hear he's of Scottish descent? In no other instance is the ancestry mentioned. — Dave Eggers

He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man's wife's health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept the names of his customers' families and what was wrong with them. A man's wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote 'cancer' after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man's hardware store until she died; then he scratched out the word 'cancer' and wrote 'dead' there. "And I say thank God when they're dead," the salesman said; "that's one less to remember. — Flannery O'Connor

She had something Adam didn't. Curiosity. First step to growth
and if it wasn't for Eve's Adam would still be sitting by the side of the pool picking his nose and scratching his scalp, bamboozled by his own reflection. Off in her part of Eden, Eve hadn't bothered naming the animals. On the other hand she'd discovered how to milk some of them and how best to eat the eggs of others. She'd decided she wasn't overly keen on torrential rain and had built a shelter from bamboo and banana leaves, into which she'd retire when the heavens opened, having set out coconut shells to catch the rainwater with a view to saving herself the schlep down to the spring every time she wanted a drink. The only thing you won't be surprised to hear about is that she'd already domesticated a cat and called it Misty. — Glen Duncan

What's always exciting is when you hear something amazing when you least expected it. Every now and then I'll hear something for the first time that forces me to re-examine my frames of reference, and re-consider musical parameters in general, and that's wonderful . And what's even more wonderful in a way, is when you hear something that you know, and already think you have an opinion about, and then suddenly discover that it isn't what you thought it was, but something quite different, which makes it just as surprising as if you'd never heard it before. That's REALLY great! — Fred Frith

The old face, crinkled and dented with canals running every which way, pushed and shoved up against itself for a while, till a big old smile busted out from beneath 'em all, and his grey eyes fairly glowed. It was the first time I ever saw him smile free. A true smile. It was like looking at the face of God. And I knowed then, for the first time, that him being the person to lead the colored to freedom weren't no lunacy. It was something he knowed true inside him. I saw it clear for the first time. I knowed then, too, that he knowed what I was - from the very first. — James McBride

This was it. This was what I had never felt before--an emotional connection to another human being. I'd tried kindness, I'd tried love, I'd tried friendship. I'd tried talking and sharing and watching, and nothing had ever worked until now. Until fear. I felt her fear in every inch of my body like an electric hum, and I was alive for the first time. I needed more right then or the craving would eat me alive. — Dan Wells

My first celeb crush was Hanson. I loved all three of them. My sister and I would always fight, and whenever they would come on the TV, we would always give them a kiss on the TV. And I also had a crush on Jonathan Taylor Thomas. Every time he would come on the screen, he was like my boyfriend. I was such a nerd like that. — Ashley Benson

In order to develop the willpower it takes to sacrifice, you must first realize that spending all your time and energy pursuing material comforts means you will eventually suffer. It's all about positive and negative consequences. It's very important to be aware that there are long-term consequences [for every action]. — Dalai Lama

I think, first of all, you need to love what you're doing, and then this helps in the comedian for its part in everything-but the moment you enjoy what you're doing, you try to express yourself, to find your way, and every time is different, of course. — Cecilia Bartoli

Seriously? He was going to make me explain the basics of being born with an X chromosome? Basically every female on the planet was insecure her first time being naked in a mans presence — Alannah Carbonneau

Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom and behold it, as it were, for the first time. — Arnold Bennett

The book is called 'Thanks for Nothing' and it's really the story of how I got into comedy and traces back every strand in my life that is relevant to that story. It's kind of an autobiography but isn't, as it stops about 25 years ago. It goes right up to the first time I do stand up. — Jack Dee

MY MOM SAYS IT'S TIME for me to give up now, and that what I'm doing is futile. She's upset, so her accent is thicker than usual, and every statement is a question. "You no think is time for you to give up now, Tasha? You no think that what you doing is futile?" She draws out the first syllable of futile for a second too long. My dad doesn't say anything. He's mute with anger or impotence. I'm never sure which. His frown is so deep and so complete that it's hard to imagine his face with another expression. If this were even just a few months ago, I'd be sad to see him like this, but now I don't really care. He's the reason we're all in this mess. — Nicola Yoon

Way back last summer I asked some of the most outstanding educational minds in this Nation to tackle this problem. I gave them a single instruction: find out how we can best invest each education dollar so that it will do the most good. Your support and the support of every leading education group proves that they did their job better than I had hoped, because for the first time we have succeeded in finding goals which unite us rather than divide us. — Lyndon B. Johnson

When I'd lost him the first time, before Culloden, I'd remembered. Every moment of our last night together. Tiny things would come back to me through the years: the taste of salt on his temple and the curve of his skull as I cupped his head; the soft fine hair at the base of his neck, thick and damp in my fingers ... the sudden, magical well of his blood in dawning light when I'd cut his hand and marked him forever as my own. Those things had kept him by me. — Diana Gabaldon

At first, you fall in love. You wake in the morning woozy and your twilight is lit with astral violet light. You spelunk down into each other until you come to possess some inner vision of each other that becomes one thing. Us. Together. And time passes. Like the forming of Earth itself, volcanoes rise and spew lava. Oceans appear. Rock plates shift. Sea turtles swim half the ocean to lay eggs on the mother island; songbirds migrate over continents for berries from a tree. You evolve
cosmically and geologically. You lose each other and find each other again. Every day. Until love gathers the turtles and the birds of your world and encompasses them, too. — Michael Paterniti

One time, when we'd been discussing martial arts, Murphy told me that eventually, no-one can teach you anything more about them. Once you reach that state of knowledge, the only way to keep learning and increasing your own skill is to teach what you know to others. That's why she teaches a children's class and a rape-defence course every spring and fall at one of her neighbourhood's community centres.
It sounded kind of flaky-Zen to me at the time, but Hell's bells, she'd been right. Once upon a time, it would have taken me an hour, if not more, to attain the proper frame of mind. In the course of teaching Molly to meditate, though, I had found myself going over the basics again for the first time in years, and understanding them with a deeper and richer perspective than I'd had when I was her age. I'd been getting almost as much insight and new understanding of my knowledge from teaching Molly as she'd been learning from me. — Jim Butcher

One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily. In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be. That's why writing a book of short stories is much more difficult than writing a novel. Every time you write a short story, you have to begin all over again. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It's my job, first and foremost, to take care of the football. Guys work their tails off. That's Football 101. From the time you play youth ball to high school, college, pro, every level, that's the starting point for every quarterback. You have to take care of the ball. — Scott Tolzien

Trying to figure out how something works on that deep level, the first ninety-nine explanations you come up with are wrong. The hundredth is right. So you have to learn how to admit you're wrong, over and over and over again. It doesn't sound like much, but it's so hard that most people can't do science. Always questioning yourself, always taking another look at things you've always taken for granted," like having a Snitch in Quidditch, "and every time you change your mind, you change yourself. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

When I thought you'd died - "
"Don't say it," she choked out. "You don't have to relive that."
"No," he said. "I do. I have to tell you. It was the first time - even after all these years of expecting my own death - that I truly knew what it meant to die. Because with you gone ... there was nothing left for me to live for. I don't know how my mother did it."
"She had her children," Kate said. "She couldn't leave you."
"I know," he whispered, "but the pain she must have endured ... "
"I think the human heart must be stronger than we could ever imagine."
Anthony stared at her for a long moment, his eyes locking with hers until he felt they must be one person. Then, with a shaking hand, he cupped the back of her head and leaned down to kiss her. His lips worshiped hers, offering her every ounce of love and devotion and reverence and prayer that he felt in his soul.
-Anthony & Kate — Julia Quinn

To me, every episode is like a song, and every season is like an album. There's that part of the day when you first get the idea and you say, "This could be really funny." And you sit down and you write it. There's just something that happens there that doesn't happen when you really give it a lot of time beforehand. — Trey Parker

People made a big deal out of the fact this is the first time a sitting president has done a late-night show. We tried to have other presidents on, but President Bush went to bed every night at 9:00. And President Clinton always seemed to have other late-night plans. — Jay Leno

He was taking Kevin's cherry! The words made him harder and made him feel privileged, masterful, married. He thought how many men would pay unlimited amounts to have this inaugurating experience with this boy. He didn't want to feel like a middle-aged paedophile, he didn't even want to think all this would make a good porn film. He wanted every thrust, every second, to be laden with tenderness, a salute from him to Kevin, a deep recognition. He wanted Kevin to like what was being done to him, to push back for another joyous millimetre of penetration. He didn't want him to label it Guy's First Fuck or Kevin's First Time. He didn't want the idea and the label to crowd out the sensation or to sharpen it; he wanted it to be pure sex, undramatised. — Edmund White

It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy. — Thomas Paine

For the first time, she became vividly aware of how much of her life she had spent with her husband. It had been a period of time utterly devoid of happiness and spontaneity. A time that she'd so far managed to get through only by using up every last reserve of perseverance and consideration. All of it self-inflicted. — Han Kang

SEEING THE TRUTH MEANS looking at everything for the first time, every time. — Augusten Burroughs

He is totally dreamy Grace. You see that don't you?" Sarah gave me more Caylie learned lingo.
"Oh, don't I know. I just don't want anyone else dreaming about him."
"He's far from ugly Grace. He's gorgeous." I gave her a glare. She kept on, "I will tell you this because you are my friend. He is so gorgeous every girl in this court has fantasized about him, including me. But you don't see the way we see him look at you. The way he stops everything when you come in the room. They way his eyes pop when you speak the first time to him when you approach. It's how he breathes too Grace. He seems to hold his breath until you are close enough for him to touch. He is completely and utterly in love with you girl. — Cyndi Goodgame

The Listening Exercise
Relax. Close your eyes. Try for several minutes to concentrate on all of the sounds you hear in your surroundings, as if you were hearing an orchestra playing its instruments. Little by little, try to separate each sound from
the others. Concentrate on each one, as if it were the only instrument playing. Try to eliminate the other sounds from your awareness.
When you do this exercise every day, you will begin to hear voices. First, you will think that they are imaginary. Later, you will discover that they are
voices of people from your past, present, and future, all of them participating with you in the remembrance of time.
This exercise should be performed only when you already know the voice of your messenger.
Do this exercise for ten minutes at a time. — Paulo Coelho

I was experiencing every emotion, all at once, all the time, and it was, for the first time, completely undiluted. I was learning how to be human, and being human fucking sucks. — NOFX

When we founded Facebook, we put a lot of hours into it and worked hard every day. 'The Social Network' painted this picture that we were partying all the time, when really we only attended 2 or 3 parties during Facebook's first year. — Dustin Moskovitz

You could say that everything the musicians have learned and known over the years, all of their technical resources, are in a dialogue with the things they are discovering every time, as if it was the first time. — Fred Frith

Here goes. See, my boyfriend and I decided to stay together for the summer, you know, even though he had to go visit some family in nowhereville. At least, that's what he told me. Anyway, everything was fine at first, because you know, we talked every night, and then boom, he just stopped calling. So I called and texted him like the good girlfriend I am, and it wasn't stalkerish, I swear, because I stopped after, like, the thirtieth time. A week goes by before he finally hits me back, and he was totally drunk and all, hey, baby, I miss you and what are you wearing, like no time had passed, and I was all, you so do not deserve to know. — Gena Showalter

There's nobody on my ball club that doesn't go from first to third on a base hit, or from second to home. Every time you steal a base, you're taking a gamble on getting thrown out, and taking the bat out of the hitter's hand. — Casey Stengel

Every last cast is actually a first cast. The first cast and first chance to catch the next fish. The next time you anguish about whether to make that last cast, forget it - the anguish that is - and cast away. The next fish caught on a last cast will not be the first. — Tony Bishop

There was a time in my life when election year was nothing to me, but in 1912, I joined that great army of Americans who drop a stitch in their routine every four years, and give themselves up to backing first a candidate for the nomination and afterwards a nominee. — Margaret Case Harriman

I remember the first time my friend Colin Lewis, who used to be a judge with me on a show on MuchMusic called 'disBAND,' told me, 'I think I just found your next favorite artist to adore.' He sent me The Weeknd, and he was completely spot on. The Weeknd is literally on every playlist I have. — Hannah Simone

Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? — Herman Melville

Every person is worth your time, Hannibal. If at first appearance a person seems dull, then look harder, look into him. — Thomas Harris

The first time I cut all my hair off was when I was 19. I just got fed up going to the salon every week. I'd had enough! On a whim, it was off. It's low-maintenance. — Lupita Nyong'o

Every Princess has one Prince to share the loves and joys of life, and do you know how that Princess knows which Prince is hers?"
"How Mommy?"
"From the kiss."
"But how?"
"The very first kiss with your Prince will change your life. When your lips touch for the first time, the earth will feel like it stops moving, but in the same moment, the world around you spins. It'll feel like fireworks in the night sky. Like a bright light in the darkness. You'll feel your heart beat fast in your ears but silence will surround you. And when you pull apart and open your eyes and look at each other, and really see each other. You'll know it in that moment, through that kiss, that you've just let someone own a piece of your heart, and you'll live happily ever after. — Jay McLean

His hands were the first thing she saw. Callused and blunt, they grasped the sides of the ladder as he raised himself the final few rungs. He was grinning by the time he cleared the base of the roof. "Hello, Liberty Sawyer," he said casually. She nodded in his direction, mimicking his nonchalant air. "Michael." He was about to step onto the roof when he paused to sniff the air. The expression on his face was sheer masculine satisfaction. "You are wearing my perfume." "Every day." His grin deepened. "Good." For a big man, he was surprisingly graceful as he stepped onto the roof. With an agile twist he turned and sat beside her. "I have traveled nine hundred miles to see that smile again. It was worth every step. — Elizabeth Camden

For the first time in a year, I wanted to live
because I wanted to spend every freaking day watching her open her eyes to the world. Hell, I wanted to be the first thing she saw. Sometimes, reality's a bitch. — Rachel Van Dyken

Don't never follow your first mind, cause that's the one that's wrong. 'Cause the Devil beats God to you every time. — Son House

You're nothing like your sister," he tells me. "She meant a lot to me, okay? It's true. But the things I like about you have nothing to do with her. You - you are so strong and stubborn it drives me crazy. You're the one going through all this and you still put Laney first every time, instead of throwing yourself the pity party we both know you deserve. You call me out on my shit, and I like that, because sometimes I need someone to call me out on my shit. And you get Johnny Cash, and you take these incredible photos, and everything about you makes me hurt, in a good way, and it blows my mind that someone can be so amazing and not even see it. — Hannah Harrington

More often than not, at the end of the day (or a month, or a year), you realize that your initial idea was wrong, and you have to try something else. These are the moments of frustration and despair. You feel that you have wasted an enormous amount of time, with nothing to show for it. This is hard to stomach. But you can never give up. You go back to the drawing board, you analyze more data, you learn from your previous mistakes, you try to come up with a better idea. And every once in a while, suddenly, your idea starts to work. It's as if you had spent a fruitless day surfing, when you finally catch a wave: you try to hold on to it and ride it for as long as possible. At moments like this, you have to free your imagination and let the wave take you as far as it can. Even if the idea sounds totally crazy at first. — Edward Frenkel

I had always heard rumors of her, Nanook thought, she who can control the wind, the water, the earth, and fire ... she who can talk to time. But those were old myths of a woman who lived many thousands of years ago, the first daughter of the Earth. There is a prophecy that she will return again, during the end times -- every religion has someone like that, someone to wait for and put your faith in, but my culture had mostly covered up her existence. We had a god of the sea, a god of the land, a god of the air, a god of fire, but no one who could control all of the elements. We spoke, only in whispers, of the ancient bloodline -- the descendents of the Great Mother. Too many superstitious minds, too many men concerned only with their own power and position, had heard these whispers in the past and taken gruesome steps to erase the descendents. The lineage was said to be broken, the blood of the Great Mother spilled for the last time. — Sarah Warden

When you're starting out as an actor, you keep raising the stakes. First, you just want to be a character who comes on stage and gets a laugh or two and exits. Just five minutes on a stage, not even Broadway. But every time you say your little prayer at night, you place more demands. — Charles Kimbrough

Them up when the other team had a runner on third. By the time the Yankees came to town - this was going on to the end of April - the whole stadium would flush orange when the Bombers had a runner on third, which they did often in that series. Because the Yankees kicked the living shit out of us and took over first place. It was no fault of the kid's; he hit in every game and tagged out Bill Skowron between home and third when the lug got caught in a rundown. — Stephen King

I have a shoebox: for ideas, fragments, snatches of conversation I hear. I scrawl it down, throw the scraps in the box. Every time I start a new script I start picking through the pieces. Suddenly you get five pieces together and think: this is almost the first Act of a movie, if I flesh it out a bit. — Shane Black

The first time I ever saw people of any color was when D-Day left from my hometown in England, to go and free Europe from the war. And there was every color you could imagine, and I'd not seen that in England. — Richard Dawson

I started the first drafts of the book during my sophomore year of college. I wasn't thinking at all about kids at the time. But I was thinking. A lot. About everything. I wish I could capture that head-space again; everything meant something to me in college. Every leaf, every sound, every lecture, every textbook. It's like I was on drugs, 24/7. I am glad I was able to pair that ceaseless pondering with plenty of time to write. What came of that time was the first draft of the novel, a lengthy, unnecessarily angst-driven pile of crap. Years later, with Zoloft, I approached the novel with a more level head, and came away with a much, much better novel. My advice to writers, I suppose, is write your novel when you feel like shit; edit when you feel great. — Caleb J. Ross

Every time feels like my first time. And I just find that the process of it feeds into one's own self-obsession. — Ben Harper

Sole Alessandra Torre I've had a lot of firsts in the last three years. Today is a new one. First time throwing a three-year-old Birthday party, Hollywood Style. Too bad my sexier-than-sin husband is absolutely no help. And Cocky is in the pool. And Ben is having a panic attack. And Justin is feeding my child sugar at every opportunity. This is past the dirt, and more than just Hollywood. This is our life as Sole. — Alessandra Torre

They met in the library searching for old Sidney Sheldon books. Her silence and calmness drew her to him. His brooding nature drew him to her. Conversations flowed like the waters of a water-fall! And every time they met their conversations sparked flames like the forest caught in a wild fire!

There was something in her eyes! Her eyes were expressive and from the first day that they met, they spoke to him a million things! He could know which night she had cried, which night she had slept peacefully and which night of hers had been spent in complete sleeplessness. He began reading her eyes more deeply and passionately than the books in the library...

And being an obsessive man, he did things normal men did not! Like he knew the number of strands of hair that her eye-lashes had! — Avijeet Das

Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window ... that was the moment, Maxi. Not when 'everything changed.' When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we've become, what we've been all the time."
"And what we've always been is ... ?"
"Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who's paying for it, who's starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs ... planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There's no uninnocent dead. — Thomas Pynchon

The first time I fired up a car, felt the engine shudder and the wheel come to life in my hands, I was hooked. It was a feeling I can't describe. I still get it every time I get into a race car. — Mario Andretti

I don't know how long we talked about that game the first time my dad showed me the ticket stub. He admitted he hadn't even been sure that he still had it, that he was surprised when he'd been able to find it. But we've spent hours and hours and hours talking about it since. And it's pretty amazing, because that ticket stub sat in a box for two decades - once it let my dad into a stadium to see a baseball game, and then later, it let me into my dad's world, into his past, to learn about the man who taught me to love a game so passionately that it shaped nearly every aspect of my life. — Tucker Elliot

Every show is a mess at its first preview. No one's had enough time to rehearse in costumes, traffic patterns backstage haven't been worked out, machinery weighing thousands of pounds is being operated for the first time. And, also, it's the first time all the material you've written is before the public. — Maury Yeston

I have little routines in the theater. Once I've established something, like the order of putting on makeup and a costume, I have to invariably do it in the same order every time, even if I only did it by chance the first time round. — Ian McKellen

Then came my favorite line of all: "you are to give him the name Jesus" (v. 31). Do you realize this was the first proclamation of our Savior's personal name since the beginning of time? Jesus. The very name at which every knee will one day bow. The very name that every tongue will one day confess. A name that has no parallel in my vocabulary or yours. A name I whispered into the ears of my infant daughters as I rocked them and sang lullabies of His love. A name by which I've made every single prayerful petition of my life. A name that has meant my absolute salvation, not only from eternal destruction, but from myself. A name with power like no other name. Jesus. — Beth Moore

The Weirdos

On our first date, he bought me a taco, talked at length about the ancients' theories of light, how it streams at all angles to align events in space and time, that it is the source of all information, determines every outcome, how we can reflect it to summon aliens using mirrored bowls of water. — Ottessa Moshfegh

She was trembling, and so was he. Like the first time, he thought. For her. For him. And just as
terrifying and tremendous.
The late winter sun was a white wash of light through the windows. In the silence of the house he
could hear every catch of her breath. When he skimmed his fingers lightly over her, she was all soft
skin and quivers.
Smooth. Warm. Beautiful. — Nora Roberts

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo
which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead. — Neal Stephenson

The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means 'two,' and the word zweifel, which means 'doubt' - suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life's journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers - always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Every time I walk down one of those red carpets, you think I'd be used to it after all these years, but it's like it's happening for the first time. — Jeff Bridges

Every time you walk into church, the first thing you see is a man on a cross. He died to save us-not to give us everything we want-to save us. That's what's so hard to understand. It's not about him answering your prayers-it's about you being like him not matter what happens on this Earth. 'Thy will be done.' There will always be sadness and pain. — Jack Mayer

I do not know why, because that is not my job, but history shows that every time a teenage boy opens a permanent marker, he will first sniff it before deciding how to go about defacing the planet. — Andrew Smith

I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time. — Danny Hillis

And thus, unknowingly, did Dor begin to serve his sentence - to hear every plea from every soul who desired more of the thing he had first identified, the thing that moved man further from the simple light of existence and deeper into the darkness of his own obsessions. Time. It seemed to be running too fast for everyone but him. — Mitch Albom

But, in the end, the books that surround me are the books that made me, through my reading (and misreading) of them; they fall in piles on my desk, they stack behind me on my shelves, they surprise me every time I look for one and find ten more I had forgotten about. I love their covers, their weight and their substance. And like the child I was, with the key to the world that reading gave me, it is still exciting for me to find a new book, open it at the first page and plunge in, head first, heart deep. — Ramona Koval

The first priority will consist in restoring a sense of the acceptance of life as a gift from God. According to both Sacred Scripture and the wisest traditions of your continent, the arrival of a child is always a gift, a blessing from God. Today it is high time to place greater emphasis on this: every human being, every tiny human person, however weak, is created 'in the image and likeness of God' (Gen 1:27) — Pope Benedict XVI

You don't need to sleep with more men to gain more experience. You need to wake up and understand that practicing with different teams every time won't make you perfect for one team. The team you need practice with is the team you're guaranteed to be on forever. Get the ring first, then, get to practicing. — Pierre Alex Jeanty